“I was excited about participating in and passing the bootcamp. It really opened the door to the testing profession for me.”
Ina Uhde, Test Analyst, Planit
The field of testing is no mystery to Ina Uhde, who says she comes from a family of testers. However, keen to strike out on her own, she chose the field of language interpretation and translation for her tertiary education.
Testing entered the picture again a few years later when Ina found herself considering a career change.
“Testing was suggested to me as a new career option and it sparked my interest,” she says. “It offered such a fascinating combination of analytical thinking and creativity.”
While doing research about the testing industry in Australia, Ina discovered Planit and it stood out to her as a local market leader. This was when she saw that an upcoming Software Testing Bootcamp (STBC) would be held in Perth.
Ina put in an application and was selected as one of a dozen individuals to participate in the five-day intensive training program. During that time, she was up-skilled in the key components of testing in preparation for the day-to-day activities of a tester working for any number of clients.
“I was excited about participating in and passing the bootcamp,” Ina says. “It really opened the door to the testing profession for me.”
Now a Test Analyst at the Perth office, Ina says she has been exposed to several opportunities to grow her testing career. A personal highlightwas presenting, after only 18 months with Planit, at the TestWest 2018 conference in Perth about her career transformation from translator to tester.
The life of a tester has been a learning process for Ina, both figuratively and literally. In addition to learning about the testing industry and technologies, she has been able to make use of Planit’s extensive and industry leading training programmes to continually up skill and get further certified.
For Ina, the drive to keep improving is to understand the role as a tester within the team, as well as be an advocate for testing best practices. “I want to be able to add value to our clients’ operations, and in order to do that, I need to be across a number of methodologies and techniques,” she says.
Having made the jump from one career path into the testing space, Ina’s advice to someone who is starting out in quality assurance is to not be deterred by not having a technical background.
“I didn’t have one either and it hasn’t stood in my way,” she says. “If testing intrigues and excites you, you already have the right mindset to succeed as a tester.”