Been in software testing for more than 10 years now, worked for companies like Adobe, Amazon and other.
Here is a list of skills you need to develop/improve in order to become a better software engineer:
- Understand your product/service
- Test everything (retest after fixes)
- Ask a lot of questions (master exploratory testing)
- Be curious (ask for documentation, but go far beyond)
- Challenge designs and implementations
- Pay attention to details
- Understand your costumer (workflows, user experience)
- Be the link between product owners, UX designer and developers
- Create good test plans (and automate test cases)
- Understand the framework (push boundaries and limits)
This list is of course not limited, but if you master the list above, you have a high probability:
- save time by catching a lot of important bugs even before coding starts
- release good quality products/services
- be valuable to your team
- continue to improve
Working closely with product teams, designers, engineers and be involved in the full feature creation process in order to ensure that we are keeping highest quality standards by creating automation tools and tests from scratch to successfully deliver a valuable experience for users.