Speaker A
Hello and welcome to one of the courses on conscious mercantilism and IT mentors. First of all, we need to understand why this course is worth watching until the end and paying full attention to, and how it differs from any other public courses. To do this, we need to understand who IT mentors are. They are a group of people who earn most of their profit from placing candidates in jobs and completing their probation period. That is, they don’t just throw some materials and say, "Come on, bro, study." They guide candidates through employment and then support them during the first days of work. This means that in this course, we tried to cover the most important topics for employment. We constantly remove unnecessary content from our materials, add relevant market questions, and try to keep the course on the edge where we don’t overload beginners with too much theory but provide practically applicable knowledge. This knowledge will be enough to pass interviews with all those tricky questions and successfully complete the probation period. Because, I remind you, if a candidate feels bad at work, they won’t get paid, will be fired, and then the mentor won’t get paid either. One of the most common requests to IT mentors is to get into IT through QA or testing. The demand for QA is indeed growing, but so are the requirements. In 2020, it was enough to know what a bug is, but now beginners are expected to know the basics of programming in Python and have at least a year of experience. Where to get this year of experience can be seen via the corresponding link. We have a separate guide. Well, this course is designed to help with the basics of testing and programming. It is also important for you to understand how this course is structured. It has several extensive chapters, each consisting of several parts. All of this is laid out in time codes for your convenience. We specifically decided not to split the course into many different videos so that at any moment you can return to an important chapter or re-listen to information you didn’t fully grasp. We will start completely from scratch for beginners and finish with testing practice. So, if you have already watched something, feel free to open the time codes and go to the sections that really interest you. After difficult theoretical parts, we immediately offer practical assignments to consolidate the theoretical material and apply it in practice. A detailed analysis of each homework assignment and an explanation of the correct answer are provided in a separate section available to members of the conscious mercantilism community. First, so that you don’t immediately know the correct answer and can think a little. And second, because there is really a lot of information that needs separate discussion, and the course would become too bulky otherwise. Within the course, you will meet several speakers. Well, because watching only my face for six hours straight would tire everyone. Each of them prepared their own chapter and material. So, if you like someone’s presentation style and want to communicate personally, read what is written under their videos. That is their Telegram nickname. You can contact them personally there. If you want to watch everything at once and not think about which parts you missed, go to Boosty. There you will find a ready text transcription of this entire guide. If you perceive text and pictures better than voice, that’s an option. I also want to explain why this course is publicly available if we supposedly have mentors who charge for training. The thing is, the main value of a mentor is not in the information. All the information is already available on the internet, in ChatGPT or other neural networks. You can get it there. The value of a mentor lies in diagnostics, in checking that you are truly ready to go to an interview, show a decent result, and then do your job. The value of a mentor is in psychological and moral support. The value of a mentor is that you can ask them any questions, unlike ChatGPT. But unlike ChatGPT, a mentor does not hallucinate or give you general answers. They always know what is currently relevant in the market and what is, in general, probably not worth learning. Mentors are not interested in teaching you the basics. You should go to a mentor when you have already passed the basics and don’t understand what to do next. It’s not obvious to you how to jump from "I know a lot" to "I work for money." So, it’s all logical. If you are not interested in mentoring, watch the course and get a job. We will only be glad. Testing is a technical check of the actual behavior of a program against the expected behavior. Its goal is to identify errors, ensure quality, and convey information to stakeholders. Why is testing needed before release? It helps save money. An error found at early stages costs much less. It allows checking compliance with requirements, gives a user’s perspective on the product, and helps find unplanned usage scenarios. Principles of testing: testing demonstrates the presence of defects but does not guarantee their absence. Exhaustive testing is impossible except in trivial cases. Early testing helps find defects as early as possible. Defect clustering: most errors are found in a limited number of modules. The pesticide paradox: repeating the same tests stops revealing new defects. Testing depends on the project context. For example, a banking service or a news portal. You will test differently. The misconception of no errors: the absence of found errors does not mean the product is ready. A QA specialist is paid not only for found bugs and defects but also for improving quality processes and minimizing reputational losses. But this is when one delivery app leaks all addresses into a public field, and now everyone knows what junk you order at 3:00 a.m. Also, for ensuring product stability and reliability. From the above, you might have noticed that there is bug hunting and product quality assurance. These are different tasks. The narrowest part of a tester’s job is testing, the process of finding errors. Quality control includes testing and also controlling the correction of found errors, that is, controlling the result. It focuses on the finished product. Quality assurance includes everything I mentioned but also involves organizing processes so that errors occur as rarely as possible and focuses on processes. Thus, testing is part of quality control, and quality control is part of the broader QA system. If it is still difficult to understand, just screenshot this table, hang it somewhere, keep it, and with practice, you will understand the differences. Now that we have delved a bit into the testing process, you can guess what role a tester plays in a development team. If it is still difficult to understand how QA differs from a developer, let’s again look at the goals, focus, and results of their work. But this time, compare an average developer and an average tester. We have prepared a table again, which you can return to and quickly refresh your memory when preparing for interviews. If you read carefully, it becomes clear that although the differences in focus, tools, and mindset are significant, the overall goal of both the developer and the tester is the same: to make a quality working product. Simply put, although the developer must primarily implement all customer requirements in the product, they cannot ignore possible risks. Likewise, the tester must identify any risks in advance but remember that the output should be a product needed by the customer. A practical situation: if your release is burning and some super important feature that everyone has long awaited is about to be released, you should not block...
