Like a war, in battles, soldiers need to have a variety of weapons to kill their enemy. I would like to share with you essential recommendations to effectively become a top-notch tester, called WEAPON.

Wisdom
Use a dictionary or Google Translate tool, the definition of wisdom is “the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment; the quality of being wise”. A wise man is a person who has wide experience and deep understanding. And when making a decision, to have a wise choice, they usually based on careful thought and good judgment.

English
Clearly, English is used as a language of international communication. And it is the most common second language in the world. Therefore, I don’t need to tell you why English skill is so important. As a rule of thumb, you need to keep learning and improving English skills day by day if it is not your mother language. There are a lot of ways to improve English skills, it depends on your learning methods and commitment. To me, regarding speaking and listening, I usually listen to and watch videos on Ted Talks. In terms of reading and writing, I try to my best to read English books, articles and so forth and write blog posts like one.

Asking questions
Why? Asking questions is to help you discover unspoken, unclear and unknown software requirements; understand what stakeholder’s expectation are; detect what the risks are. By doing so, you likely make your testing strategy and execute tests more effective.
In short, to get information as much as possible, you should ask open questions starting with words: why, what, where, when, who, and how.

Proactive person
Proactive is one of 7 good habits which are mentioned in the book “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey. In the book, he said “Highly proactive people recognize that responsibility. They do not blame circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior. Their behavior is a product of their own conscious choice, based on values, rather than a product of their conditions, based on feeling.”

Out-of-box thinker
Don’t get me wrong here. In software testing, I don’t expect you are a creative person or reinvent the wheel as a scientist Thomas Edison. Let’s think outside the box or think differently. We are usually taught black-box and white-box. Don’t stick on these boxes. If you think like other’s view such as developers, product owners, you tend to fall in traps to check what the requirement mentioned and potentially lack a lot of bugs or risks. When you think outside the box, or from an unconventional, new perspective. It’s critical to distinguish between a mediocre tester and a great one.

Non-stop learning
Surely, no matter what you do, where you work, self-improvement or self-growth is one of the essential points to have a successful career. Looking at well-known and the most successful people in over the world such as Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, they spend much of their time on reading. They understand the fact that they have to continuously learn to be successful. From where I stand, non-stop learning is a way to keep me motivated and guarantee to have job security.