Reddit reviews Exploratory Software Testing: Tips, Tricks, Tours, and Techniques to Guide Test Design

Your story sounds so similar to mine. I worked as a psychologist for a few years, then I had to change the path (for reasons that did not depend on me) and by chance I got a job as a tester in a company, based solely on what they called my "analytical skills". Needless to say, I felt completely lost in the beginning, having no IT background.

I am a manual tester and have started to play around on codecademy to learn some basics. At first I was very afraid that my skills will not live up to the demands of the developers, but I noticed that it was actually a bit of an advantage that I did not think like them - I was just curious about the applications and I tried to find out who the users might be, how they would use the application, what they would try to do with it. I also was lucky in developing a good working relationship with the developers and I did ask questions to try and find out as much as I could use to guide my testing. I think it is critical to ask: ask the devs, ask yourself what a user would do, ask what the expectations of the end users could be, think about the context etc etc. Scenarios are a great mind tool and testing tool.

I agree that I sometimes feel lost with this ad-hoc testing, and I felt like I needed some sort of structure to my thinking. I stumbled upon a great book that you would maybe enjoy too at this point: http://www.amazon.com/Exploratory-Software-Testing-Tricks-Techniques/dp/0321636414. Since then I've started talking about tours in testing, and I've developed mine also.

I still feel inadequate from time to time. As a matter of fact, I came to reddit today to try and find out where a less technical tester could start in learning automation :))

I'm with ya on the test case counts as well as all the other practices which waste testing resources. I wish all that would end someday...so so badly.

I agree that exploratory testing is a better path to take with testing than writing up hundreds upon hundreds of steps that end up being completely unmaintainable in agile development, even with the best of intentions.

I found the book linked below on exploratory software testing to be a great resource on manual testing, since a lot of good test execution is just a mode of thought. If your employer prefers manual test cases (eww) then you could still use these techniques to write good ones.

Exploratory Software Testing: Tips, Tricks, Tours, and Techniques to Guide Test Design https://www.amazon.com/dp/0321636414