Welcome to t3st3r.com How I became a tester by accident back in 2010 - My story I had studied Business Management at the university and had pretty good IT skills, but I did not have formal education in computer science. In 2010 I was working as a Logistics controller or 'scheduler' as they called it, in an international chemical company in Barcelona. The company had decided to upgrade its existing software and needed someone from the logistics team to participate in the implementation project as a future 'Subject Matter Expert' or SME for Europe. The initial scope was to ensure that the requirements were met and a correct integration with existing tools was successful. I was eventually selected for this role and in the coming months and years, I would spend several weeks in the US Headquarters together with my American and Asian counterparts to specify the requirements we had in terms of workflows and processes. My responsibilities included but were not limited to 1. Document current workflows and work processes 2. Document the requirements 3. Design test cases 4. Execute test cases once the early version was ready for testing 5. Bug reporting and retesting 6. Create training material for the users 7. Train the team before go-live 8. Give support to the team during & after go-live 9. Become QA / Trainer / 1st point of contact for the team. Yep, that was a big scope. Looking back, the hardest part of the implementation was not the testing and bug reporting, but getting the acceptance of the team to change to the new logistics tool that was about to replace the existing work processes on a department operating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You don't know what you don't know The learning curve is very steep when you get involved in software development for the first time. Although a lot has changed since 2010 - especially how Agile development has changed the way software is built today in 2022 - absorbing all the information during my onboarding to the development team was a massive task, to say the least. When coming from a business background, the thought process that the development team had, was so different from what I was used to. Everything was measured and technically analyzed. I watched in awe how they started to translate our business requirements into technical requirements or features. Learning curve As time passed, I made the role my own and stayed involved in the project up until 2017. Over 7 years I watched the project grow from an idea to a fully functioning software. It is pretty amazing what can be done when projects are properly managed. I learned so much from those early years in my career as a software tester. There were times that I was ready to give up but I'm happy that I didn't. Those early days with nothing but HP Quality Center, MS Excel, and some common sense got me started in Quality Assurance and I'm very happy where it has taken me. Nearly 12 years and 7 projects later I'm still heavily involved in QA. Cheers to humble beginnings! Juhani