I’ve just finished the Tester School, a training course in Polish run (under the name of Szkoła Testera) by Norbert Jankowski who is a tester with more than 10 years of experience. The training is available on szkolatestera.pl and consists of 60 video lessons of a total duration of more than 6.5 hour, and 11 bonus materials that make additional 6 hours.
The School took me more than 2 weeks to complete. During this time, I watched videos, made notes of everything useful in my OneNote and checked additional resources proposed by the author or connected with the educational materials. This was the theoretical part. As a practice, Norbert made available Mantis Bug Tracker and encouraged the learners to find and report bugs, typos etc. Because the training is full of typos deliberately introduced by the author (to make a training ground), it is quite easy to find them. Therefore, I focused on functional and general aspects and reported several bugs connected with missing material, inconsistencies with other parts of the website or errors in some calculations presented during one of the lessons.
Mantis is really easy to comprehend and use. I think the ability to enter and discuss the defects gave me enough time to familiarize with this tool.
The good thing is that the author is really helpful if you have any questions. I used his help when I had doubts about test cases.
The training is focused mainly on the theory. The only way to practise is to enter defects to Mantis Bug Tracker. At first, I’ve found it quite disappointing, but now I really appreciate the basics that I learned. Along the way, I downloaded tons of other materials about tests. Now when I read all the stuff, I only make notes of some additions and extensions, because all the fundamental concepts are already obvious for me after this training. It is also much easier to report bugs, regardless of the tool, if you don’t need to search for e.g. differences between priority and severity of bugs.
The material also encompasses all aspects of a tester’s work, from searching for job opportunities and for places where you can earn experiences, through job interview, to first days at work and different work arrangements.
I really recommend the training for beginners. It gives strong fundamentals and allows studying from more advanced sources. And it is definitely worth its price.
