QTP jobs

There are hundreds of QTP jobs listed on the internet everyday. QA Tester will find great number of positions offering amazing salaries for testers, outstanding benefits, great growth potentials and training by searching on Craigslist.com “QTP Tester” jobs, looking on Linkedin.com for “QTP Engineer” jobs. As expected, there is plenty of competition for these QTP jobs in the testing field. So, how does Quality Assurance Tester land one of those great HT Quick Test Professional testing jobs? Almost all recruiters and hiring managers state that everything boils down to technical and communication skills, but do you think that the knowledge of HP QTP enough to get hired? Let’s take a look on what additional skills and training is required from QA Engineer who wants to work as QTP Test Automation Tester.

I inspected QTP job postings in LinkedIn and Craigslist for Software QA Testers and Engineers indicating that knowledge of HP QTP is required. The job advertisements require knowledge of HP Quick Test Professional in the various forms:

• Experience in multiple web projects acting as a test automation lead for front end web testing using automation tools including HP Quick Test Pro (QTP);
• Proven experience of designing, building, maintaining a software test automation framework using HP Quick Test Pro (QTP);
• In-depth knowledge of QTP as well as experience in advanced automation frameworks including modular and keyword approaches;

Not surprisingly there are the number of QTP job posting mixing and matching several software testing tools. It sounds like these companies do not have yet any test automation in place yet or think that all test automation tools are look a like:

• Preferred experience with automated software testing tools for browser and server side testing (e.g. QTP, and Selenium);
• Proficient with web automation tools like Selenium, Watir, Silk, QTP, and/or WinRunner;
• Strong working knowledge one or more of the following software tools: SilkTest, QTP,
• Selenium, Watir, LoadRunner, SilkPerformer, JMeter, JUnit or similar tools as needed;

As expected the job requirement include additional skill and knowledge required from prospective candidate.

• Good knowledge of RDBMS such as Oracle, MS SQL Server or DB2
• Programming experience with in C, C++, JavaScript, Python, Perl, and/or XML
• Experience with Java, Oracle, Ajax, Rest/XML, Tomcat and Hudson is a plus

Here is what I discovered after checking several hundreds job postings. QTP QA engineer should posses the following technical skills in addition to QTP experience.

• coding skills - 100%
• HTML, JavaScript - 100%
• Windows - 100%
• Linux/Unix - 60%
• SQL (MS SQL, Oracle and MySQL) - 95%
• Microsoft .NET- 64%
• Java EE - 55%
• HTML 5 - 10%
• mobile testing - 19%
• PHP, Ruby, Perl -15%

Overall, whether you are just starting out as a QTP Tester, or you have several years of testing experience, the knowledge of only HP QuickTest pro is not enough. QA Engineer must have for sure programming skills and be ready to do configure Windows or Linux box, if needed.

Testing Android with QTP

There are QTP extensions allowing to automate mobile testing on Android and mobile applications. These plugins extend HP QTP 11, integrate into existing testing environment and can be used to build functional and regression test suites for Android testing on emulators and real devices.

SeeTest developed by Experitest is the software automation testing tool that allows to define test cases, export them to HP QTP and execute test cases in QuickTest Professional environment.

M-eux Test created by Jamo Solutions integrates completely into HP QTP 11 and let QA Tester to capture, verify and replay user interactions automatically for mobile applications.

Related book

1. Android Application Testing Guide - is a highly detailed book which gives step-by-step examples for a great variety of real-world case. If you are an Android QA Tester looking to test your applications, then this book is for you. No previous experience in mobile application testing is required.

HP QTP 11 evaluation version

HP QTP 11 evaluation version is finally available for download for registered user as a part of HP Functional Testing 11. The only requirement for QTP 11 trial version download is the registration on HP software download center web site. The evaluation version is good for 30 days.

HP Functional Testing 11 provides functional and regression test automation for every major software application and environment, including advanced Web 2.0 toolkits, leading Rich Internet Application (RIA) development technologies, Web services, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications.

The product allows test execution in Internet Explore and Firefox browsers and comes with comprehensive support for Web 2.0 technologies such as Flex, Dojo, YUI, Silverlight, GWT, and Ajax. QA Testers can also provide high-level support for third-party and custom Web controls that are not supported out of the box. The Extensibility Accelerator, a separate utility included with HP Functional Testing, speeds the development of support for additional Web toolkits.

In addition, HP Functional Testing supports major applications and environments such as Oracle, SAP, Seibel, Windows Presentation Foundation, Delphi, PowerBuilder, ASP .Net, J2EE, and more.

HP QTP interview question 35: Using HP QTP on locked system or with Microsoft Remote Desktop connection

There is a problem with running HP QTP on a locked system or using Microsoft Remote Desktop connection. As soon as QA Tester locks monitor or minimized RDC window HP QTP cannot control anymore the mouse and keyboard and test cases would fail. It seems that most obvious solution is to never lock machine or minimize the desktop session, but what if you need to do other work on machine where Remote Desktop Connection windows is open?
There is another HP QTP trick: connect via Remote Desktop session into first test machine and from that machine hook up into machine with HP QTP installed. Then when someone closes Remote Desktop from the first machine, the remote machines session would stay open. It is strange solution, but it work in our QA Lab environment.

QTP Interview question 34: Explain the difference between VBScript function and VBScript subroutine?

Advanced QTP interview questions may examine not only various aspects of QA tester's hands-on experience with HP QTP, but how deep the interviewee knows VBScript - HP Quick Test Professional scripting language. The candidate for QTP QA tester position should be familiar with VBScript variables and arrays, able to explain the difference between VBScript function and VBScript subroutine and for some high level test position show the real life experience working with VBScript classess.

VBScript subroutine is a series of statements, enclosed by the Sub and End Sub statements, can perform actions, but does not return a value, can take arguments and without arguments, it should include an empty set of parentheses.

VBScript function is a series of statements, enclosed by the Function and End Function statements, can perform actions and can return a value, can take arguments that are passed to it by a calling procedure, without arguments should include an empty set of parentheses and returns a value by assigning a value to its name.

The major difference between VBScript function and a subroutine, is that a function can return a value back to where it was called from.