How the Domain Knowledge helps in Testing

Am posting this post according to my experience and research on how the domain knowledge will helps while testing:

“Looking at the current scenario from the industry it is seen that the testers are expected to have both technical testing skills as well either need to be from the domain background or have gathered domain knowledge.I would like to know why and when this domain knowledge helps to the tester during the testing cycle?”

First of all I would like to introduce three dimensional testing career mentioned by Danny R. Faught. There are three categories of skill that need to be judged before hiring any software tester. What are those three skill categories?
1) Testing skill
2) Domain knowledge
3) Technical expertise.

No doubt that any tester should have the basic testing skills like Manual testing and Automation testing. Tester having the common sense can even find most of the obvious bugs in the software. Then would you say that this much testing is sufficient? Would you release the product on the basis of this much testing done? Certainly not. You will certainly have a product look by the domain expert before the product goes into the market.

While testing any application tester thinks like an end-user. But every human being has the limitations and one can’t be the expert in all dimensions. So you can’t assure that you can think 100% like how the end-user going to use your application/product. User who is going to use your application may be having a good understanding of the domain he is working on. You need to balance all these skill activities so that all product aspects will get addressed.

We can observe one more reason why domain experts are most wanted! When you hire fresh engineers who are just out of college you cannot expect them to compete with the experienced professionals. Why? Because experienced professional certainly have the advantage of domain and testing experience and they have better understandings of different issues and can deliver the application better and faster.

Here are some of the examples where you can see the distinct edge of domain knowledge:
1) Mobile application testing.
2) Wireless application testing
3) Web applications
4) Protocol testing
5) Banking Projects
6) Network testing

When I know the functional domain better I can better write and execute more test cases and can effectively simulate the end user actions which is distinctly a big advantage.

Here is the big list of the required testing knowledge:

Testing skill
Bug hunting skill
Technical skill
Domain knowledge
Communication skill
Automation skill
Some programming skill
Quick grasping
Ability to Work under pressure …

That is going to be a huge list. So you will certainly say, do I need to have these many skills? Its’ depends on you. You can stick to one skill or can be expert in one skill and have good understanding of other skills or balanced approach of all the skills. This is the competitive market and you should definitely take advantage of it. Make sure to be expert in at least one domain before making any move.

What if you don’t have enough domain knowledge?

You need to quickly grasp as many concepts as you can. Try to understand the product as if you are the customer and what customer will do with application. Visit the customer site if possible know how they work with the product, read online resources about the domain you want to test the application, meet the domain experts or either company will provide all this in-house training before assigning any domain specific task to testers.There is no specific stage where you need this domain knowledge. You need to apply your domain knowledge in each and every software testing life cycle.