What area are you looking for in particular please? testing in general, software development - something specific?

For my current job, doing test automation, I often say “imagine sitting at your computer, moving the mouse around, clicking on a textbox then entering some text”. “Imagine you have to do that 10 times a day, every day for 6 months”… what I do is to write a computer program/code to do exactly those same steps to occur, like a ghost would be at the computer - the mouse would move in the same way, the click would happen in the same way and the text would be entered in the same way without you having to be at the computer. If this still isn’t clear, my go to step 2 is then to show a demo of a script running… with those 2 everyone so far has got the idea without any step 3 being needed...

@alex_read - Your question is the reason why I say it is a difficult question. I get asked the question of What do you do and find it hard to explain because the context is not clear. Do I say I do automation, but then people do not know what that is, do I say I test API, but again people do not know what those are. 

If I were to ask you, as a member of the community I would want to know what is your Role and what do you do ( task, activities) during a day/week/month.

Fantastic & relevant points - awesome question! Then in that case I’d say it was more context-dependent. That last reply was more for someone in the industry or company who had an idea of software in general, maybe even testing…

If I was talking to an older generation family member the message would be completely different, something along the lines of “you know you read about all the stories in the newspaper about computer hacking, or airlines unable to take bookings due to a computer failure or UK banks not allowing people to get their wages due to a computer failure? We test the computer stuff how users would use it, way before the public ever sees it to stop such problems”.

This idea of presenting the same concept but in different levels of detail depending on the audience has a name of small chunking & big chunking in leadership & presenting circles. There’s some cool youtube videos like “Quantum Computing Expert Explains One Concept in 5 Levels” where different audiences from a small child through to a scientist are engaged for a chat. I found those quite fascinating in a geeky way :cD  

Very tricky. I can explain what do I do, but if they do not understand, then it is better to give a technical answer for them to understand. If they are inquisitive, they will ask further.  So my answer will be:

"As a tester, I ensure the quality of software or applications by designing and executing test cases to identify and report defects."

Usually my answer is in the context of what my job is for, like „I make sure all the payments get processed on time”. 
Whenever my answer included any buzzword like „software”, ”systems” or „IT” it usually ended with a follow up question like „my computer does some weird stuff, how do I fix it”

 

Alex, is that really what you do? That’s it? If that really is all you do, then I’d like to tell you there is much more that you could be doing.

With my current client, I serve testers by designing tools that allow them to specify end-to-end user journeys on a conceptual level rather than click by click. They can specify this in spreadsheet form or by using the product directly and letting my tools read the app log to identify the conceptual process. My tools, in conjunction with each user journey, perform an assay of the product behavior. I collect different kinds of data: screen scrapes of all text, contents of local storage before and after, natural screenshots and “full” screenshots, and an activity log. After the collection phase of the automation runs, a separate set of tools helps the tester analyze and report the results.This is what I call automated flagging (identification of changes or suspicious behavior) and checking (identification of definite failures).

There is no such thing as automated testing, but the automated assay, flagging, and checking allows the tester to test the product more quickly and reliably.

These tools are designed to perform the same KINDS of actions on different platforms, using mouse or keyboard, with different screen geometries, in different lagnuages, and potentially with randomized elements.

I work with the tester, who is not a coder, to identify and modify tools to help him focus on the special challenges, risks, and new features from release to release. We work as partners.

If my job were to merely to write scripts to produce the “same” behavior, I would quickly talk my employer out of having ANYONE do such a job. That would not be a job worth doing. I suspect you are oversimplifying to make it easier to explain things-- but watch out, because what that can lead to is people thinking that testing is ONLY clicking on the screen and nothing more.

Thanks for raising that. Yes my above comments were over-simplifying if that wasn’t clear to all. 

Something which has stuck with me was a comment “imagine you’re in an elevator with your CEO, they turn to you & ask what you do and you have 1 sentence to explain to them… what would you say”. My comments above were from this perspective. 

As others have mentioned, if there’s interest after this line, there will often be questions leading to further more detailed dialog afterwards… whether this is wanted or needed is context dependent also though.