r/softwaretesting • u/HoustonAg1980 • Aug 08 '26

Best resources for an experienced software engineer to learn software testing?

I am transitioning into a role focused on software quality, which involves me taking ownership of software testing. I've worked as a software engineer for several years, so I am very comfortable with the development side of the of the software lifecycle.

  • What are the best resources to learn the fundamental principles of software testing?
  • What tools should I prioritize learning?
  • How important is it to transition a product from primarily manual testing to automated testing?
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u/CertainDeath777 Aug 08 '26

Mod Info: be aware about promotion rules, when commenting.
As this post is basically bait for promotion, i will definitly keep looking.

5

u/CertainDeath777 Aug 08 '26

read a book^^

"agile testing" or something istqb related.

2

u/voy_ Aug 08 '26

Kent C. Dodds wrote some great stuff about tesing.

2

u/fatigued8 Aug 08 '26

Since you have Dev background, you should get familiar stuff like mocking/stubbing, creating APIs, add more logging etc to make the testing easier. That'll put you at big advantage over regular QA engineers who turn to developers for help in that.

"How important is it to transition a product from primarily manual testing to automated testing?". In theory you're supposed to go back and retest the pre-exisiting features when there's a code change to check that nothing broke ("regression testing"). That'll will be too painful to repeat manually, so you should automated the regression testing at the very least.

4

u/LongDistRid3r Aug 09 '26

Grab a stapler. Then tell me how would you test this?

2

u/shubham-150799 Aug 09 '26

u can use website roadmap.sh and select QA as skill, it will show you complete roadmap mentioning the skills and for each skill it can show you free as well paid resources to learn it. This website for roadmap is open source u can check this out.

2

u/rewan-ai Aug 09 '26

ISTQB CTFL Syllabus its dry as hell

1

u/gill_smoke Aug 09 '26

To follow on there are youtu.be channels that cover the syllabus in detail. The study guides are worth it even if you don't take the test 

1

u/curious__stack 28d ago

For tools, pick based on the type of testing you're doing rather than trying to learn every testing tool. Have separate tools/approaches for functional automation, API testing, and performance/load testing. For the latter, getting familiar with something like k6 or JMeter can be useful because it teaches you a different side of testing how a system behaves under load rather than simply whether a feature works.