2/04/2013

The Bilingual Tester


One of the most important skills you must have as a software tester today, is to know a second language, with a greater emphasis with English.
At present, in most of Latin America, engineers and systems analysts work mostly in Outsourcing companies. I am one of many.
My first work experiences in IT did not involve the English language, whether they were customers in the public activity, or companies that work 100% with the domestic market, or that their main customers were Mexicans. My current job does imply as a condition English, which I studied intermittently since age of 6, but that I could never practice as I have wished. Luckily I passed the tests and I am in my current job, which allowed getting to know the world of Testing and thanks to that, I'm writing this today.
But the second language, in addition to the advantage that allows you to communicate better with customers, allows an additional advantage: being able to understand what the customer wants in their stories or requirements. And this is something very important for a Tester, because their work begins when there is a new requirement (whatever the form in which we receive this requirement) and if we do not understand what they want, we can report about our Testing,something that could not be valuable to the customer.
Knowing English can also allows you communicate with the World Testers community. In previous posts I have reported how to connect with these people via Twitter, that every day they share their ideas, blogs, links and information related to the daily tasks of the Testers worldwide.
To communicate with Swedish, Finnish, Romanian, English, Canadian or American, we need a common language, and English, even with its imperfections, dominates over other languages​​, though is not the most spoken (Mandarin and Spanish are most widely spoken in the world than English, see here).
So I've decided to continue polishing my English skills, doing double duty: writing my posts in Spanish and then translated into English. Obviously when I make a post translating an article written in English, I will not put back in their original language. But I think it's worth that my articles can also be read beyond people of Latin America.

No comments:

Post a Comment