ASI

This is a rather neat question that recently came up and here’s my view on it:

1. How to increase importance: This to me is “what makes a tester valuable”; to me this is a tester who is technical and can test & verify a piece of software from all the various components involved. A solid tester has to be able to understand how the system operates from both a technical standpoint but also from a business standpoint. My testers also do the following in testing our software projects:
> Test the User Interface (UI testing).
> Perform full life cycle testing that includes Functional, Regression, and System/Integration Testing.
> Query the database for correct schema changes/structure and query to verify that the application has performed the correct data changes.
> Can navigate and make changes on a server.  We work on Linux servers and my testers can navigate through the Linux system at the command prompt, kick off cronjobs, shell scripts, verify configurations, log into other servers, etc.
> Can open up a PHP program and review the logic when necessary.
> They are also robust in using testing tools like the Quality Center, QuickTest Pro, SQL tools and various other tools used in a technical environment.

***These kinds of skills increase the importance and value of an employee/tester.

2. How to stay interested in testing?  My opinion is by staying technical and being involved in test automation, will cause you to constantly challenge yourself and have to learn new things.  These two things make testing more interesting and fun.
> Staying technical is very important because it addresses the value in the first part of the question (see above) and also keeps you very busy, very hands-on and having to test a lot more of the system which is so much more challenging but yet interesting at the same time.
> Test Automation is a valuable and hot skill to have today.  Most companies try to implement automation and always look for people that have that skill to contribute.  Test Automation is very interesting, challenging, technical, fun and very rewarding when you develop a process through automation that verifies various aspects of the application.
Staying busy, involved and testing projects from many different angles (UI, database, code, system and test automation) is very intriguing, interesting, exciting and fun.  At the same time your are providing great value to the company.