Explore tutorials, free e-books and posts related to QTP Certification and ISTQB Certification

Those who would like to become a successful IT professional can opt for smart solutions. To be a software testing specialist or other IT expert, it is important to have concise knowledge and training. These days, different types of crash courses are available through which you can get certification and  step ahead towards the success path of your profession. Therefore, if you would like to do any of the ISTQB Certification then do have the assistance of Software Testing Genius. We have been into this domain for several years and committed to serve reliable yet latest solutions to users. Software Testing Genius is operated by the experts of IT field. It is commenced on the principals to serve users who would like to make a successful career in IT industry. This is our core motive to start Software Testing Genius.

We have especially designed the website for users who can get guidance and boost-up their skills of software testing and other niche too. Under one roof, you will get quality and upgraded knowledge about the software testing and quality assurance. Users can explore recent articles and latest posts. You can download the free e-books and presentations as well as tutorials for QTP Certification, manual software testing and many more. To prepare yourself for the interview, you can access to our interview questions section too. 

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SWOT Analysis - How to Analyze your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats

SWOT Analysis is an effective method of identifying your Strengths and Weaknesses, and to examine the Opportunities and Threats you face. Often carrying out an analysis using the SWOT framework will be enough to reveal changes which can be usefully made.

To carry out a SWOT Analysis write down answers to the following questions:

Strengths:

• What are your advantages?
• What do you do well?

Consider this from your own point of view and from the point of view of the people you deal with. Don't be modest, be realistic. If you are having any difficulty with this, try writing down a list of your characteristics. Some of these will hopefully be strengths!

Weaknesses:

• What could be improved?
• What is done badly?
• What should be avoided?

Again this should be considered from an internal and external basis - do other people perceive weaknesses that you don't see? Do your competitors do any better? It is best to be realistic now, and face any unpleasant truths as soon as possible.

Opportunities:

• Where are the good chances facing you?
• What are the interesting trends?

Useful opportunities can come from such things as:

• Changes in technology and markets on both a broad and narrow scale
• Changes in government policy related to your field
• Changes in social patterns, population profiles, lifestyle changes, etc.
• Local Events

Threats:

• What obstacles do you face?
• What is your competition doing?
• Are the required specifications for your job, products or services changing?
• Is changing technology threatening your position?
• Do you have bad debt or cash-flow problems?

Carrying out this analysis is will often be illuminating - both in terms of pointing out what needs to be done, and in putting problems into perspective.

Improving Noting Skills with the Help of Mind Maps

Appreciation Technique:
Appreciation is a very simple but powerful technique for extracting the maximum amount of information from a simple fact. Starting with a fact, ask the question 'So what?' - i.e. What are the implications of that fact?

Keep on asking that question until all possible inferences have been drawn.

Appreciation is a technique used by military planners, so we will take a military example:

Fact: It rained heavily last night

• So What?
  The ground will be wet
• So What?
  It will turn into mud quickly
• So What?
  If many troops and vehicles pass over the same ground, movement will be progressively slower and more difficult as the ground gets muddier and more difficult.
• So What?
  Where possible stick to metalled roads or expect movement to be slower than normal.

While it would be possible to reach this conclusion without the use of a formal technique, appreciation provides a framework within which inferences can be extracted quickly and effectively.

Reading Technical Information & Documents

Reading Technical Information:
Technical information is typically less friendly than other information. It is often complex and assumes a high level of initial knowledge.

Manuals are often badly written - a manual is often supplied with a product purely because it is expected. In many cases it will have been given to a junior member of staff to prepare, and will not have been properly edited or reviewed.

Before wading into technical documentation, assess who it has been written for. Is it too basic to meet your needs, or is it so advanced that you cannot understand it? In the latter case it may be more cost effective to bring in an expert to do the job.

If referring to specific information, it is most effective to use the table of contents and index to find the appropriate section.

If you are reading large amounts of the material, it may be effective to photocopy the glossary, and keep this beside you. It will probably also be useful to note down the key concepts in your own words, and refer to them when necessary. Usually the most effective way of making notes is to use Mind Maps. As with other sorts of material it may be most effective to skim the material before reading it in depth.

Reading The 'Whole Subject' Documents:
When you are reading a document, such as a company report, which purports to give an overall analysis of a subject, it is easy to accept the writer's structure of thought, and miss the fact that important information has been omitted or that irrelevant detail has been included.

Where you are reviewing this sort of document, an effective technique is to compile your own table of contents headings before you open the document. You can then use this table of contents to read the document in the order that you want.

Using this technique will allow you to spot where important information is missing or has been obscured, and helps you to avoid trivia. If the writer has a better knowledge of the structure of the topic, this helps you to recognise and adjust your initial view of the best structure.

How to Improve your Reading Skills

Tips for Active Reading
This is an important concept: when you are reading it is often useful to highlight, underline and annotate the text as you go on. This emphasises information in your mind, and helps you to review important points after you have finished studying the text.

Active reading helps to keep your mind focused on the material and stops it wandering.

This is obviously only something to do if you own the document! If you find that active reading helps significantly, then it may be worth photocopying information in more expensive texts. You can then read and mark the photocopies.

Knowing what you want to know:
The most important thing to know is the goal of your study - what do you want to know after reading the text? Once you know this you can examine the text to see whether it is going to move you towards the goal.

An easy way of doing this is to look at the introduction and the chapter headings. The introduction should let you know who the book is targeted at and what it seeks to achieve, while the chapter headings will show an overall view of the structure of the subject.

While you are looking at the text, ask yourself if it is targeted at you, or assumes too much or too little knowledge. Would other material meet your needs more closely?

Knowing how deeply to study the material:
Where you only need the shallowest knowledge of the subject, you can skim the material. Here you read only chapter headings, introductions and summaries.

If you need a moderate level of information on a subject, then you can scan the text. Here you read the chapter introductions and summaries in detail, and may speed-read the contents of the chapters, picking out and understanding key words and concepts. At this level of looking at the document it is worth paying attention to diagrams and graphs.

Only when you need detailed knowledge of a subject is it worth studying the text. Here it is best to skim the material first to get an overview of the subject. Once you have done this you can read it in detail while seeing how the information presented relates to the overall structure of the subject.

How to study different sorts of materialDifferent sorts of text hold information in different places, in different ways, with different depths and breadths of coverage. By understanding the layout of the material you are reading, you can extract all useful information much more efficiently.

Reading Magazines and Newspapers:
These tend to give a very fragmented coverage of a subject, typically concentrating on the most interesting and glamorous parts of a topic while ignoring the less interesting but often essential background. Typically areas of useful information are padded out with large areas of irrelevant data or with advertising.

The most effective way of dealing with magazines is to scan their contents tables or indexes, turning directly to interesting articles. If the articles are useful they can be cut out and filed into a folder specifically covering that sort of information. The magazine can then be binned. In this way you begin to build up sets of related articles which may go some way towards explaining the scope of a subject. Information can be retrieved easily and quickly.

Newspapers tend to be arranged in sections. If you read a paper frequently you can learn which sections have useful information, and which ones can be skipped altogether.

By applying an intelligent way of reading newspapers and magazines you can significantly speed the time it takes to extract the information you need from them.

Article Types, and How to Read them:
Articles within newspapers and magazines tend to be in three main types:

News Articles:here the most important information is presented first, with information being less and less significant as the article progresses. News articles are designed to explain the key points first, and then flesh them out with detail.

Opinion Articles:Opinion articles are designed to advance a viewpoint. Here the most important information is contained in the introduction and the summary, with the middle of the article containing supporting arguments.

Feature Articles:These are written to provide entertainment or background on a subject. Typically the most important information is in the body of the text.

If you know what you want from an article, and recognising its type, you can extract information from it quickly and efficiently.

Art of Reviewing The Learned Information

Reviewing Learned Information:
This article will show you how spending a little time reviewing information after a presentation can help you to vastly improve your recall of that material.

Why Review the Information?
Information learned can be recalled most effectively 10 minutes after that learning has stopped. After this information is lost rapidly, so that after a few months only a tiny percentage can be recalled. By spending a few minutes reviewing material after the learning session, you can quickly refresh your memory, and:

• Significantly reduce the time needed to relearn the knowledge when you need it
• Ensure that you have a reasonable basis of knowledge all the time
• Allow you to improve the quality of future learning, by building on a well-remembered foundation. This allows your mind to make connections and linkages that it would not otherwise make.

The aim of frequently reviewing information is to end up storing it in memory for the long term.

How to review Reviewing information should be relatively easy and need not take long. Reviews are recommended at the following times:

• As soon as possible after learning has stopped. This can take the form of rewriting and tidying up notes
  
• After one day - take a few minutes to jot down everything remembered and compare this with your notes.
  
• After one week - as above. after one month - as above.
  
• After four months - as above.By reviewing frequently, information should be fresh in your mind, should be clearly structured, and easily accessible when you need it.
  

How to Improve Self Esteem

Self-esteem is something almost anyone can use more of. Even the people who exude confidence on the exterior probably have nagging doubts in their heart of hearts—doubts that they carefully hide from those around them, but which gnaw at their souls. Doubt can be debilitating.

Luckily, anyone can take very practical steps to improve their self-esteem. Confidence in ourselves isn’t something we’re born with overnight (unless we’re just cocky, in which case the confidence is probably ill-justified!). Anyone with a brain and a critical eye is bound to see what’s wrong in their lives. But it’s always constructive to remind yourself what’s right—and that, in any case, things can improve still more.

Following Tips shall be of great help in increasing the self-esteem.

1) Take stock of yourself
Begin by asking yourself which areas of your life and personality need the most work. What changes would you be most proud of, and find most fulfilling? Compose a list of them—five, perhaps, or ten at the most (if you’re really self-critical!). Rank them. Think about how you can go about improving each point.

2) Build yourself up
Don’t get discouraged, dwelling too much on the areas you want to improve. Remind yourself of the progress you’ve made thus far in life. Pat yourself on the back for having enough determination to try self-improvement in the first place. You’re on the right track!

3) How will you get there?
It’s not enough to decide where you want to go in terms of self-esteem; it’s more important to ask how you’re going to get there. Also, who can help get you there? Who can you trust for help, and for counsel, and even for a shoulder to cry on, if you have a temporary setback?

4) Counter-attack
Tired of suffering the blows of fate? Tired of feeling like the football of the gods? Go on the counter-attack! Take action! Formulate a battle-plan, and assert yourself. You can make things happen. You can dish it too, instead of just absorbing blows.

5) Spread the wealth
Self-esteem is something of incomparable value. At the same time, it’s something you’ve got to give in order to get. The more you build up the people around you, the more that same enthusiasm and confidence will reflect back on you. Spread that sense of optimism and excitement to every member of your team.

6) Branch out
Extend your sphere of influence, and allow yourself to be influenced by interesting and stimulating new people, as you become a member of new organizations and interest groups. Find people who share your passions, and exchange ideas.

7) Engage in extra-curricular activities
Take up a new side project, something you’ll enjoy. Make it something you’ll find relaxing, and yet exhilarating at the same time. Something that will improve you and make you a more well-rounded person. Perhaps it’ll be a hobby or club or recreational activity.

8) Never stop learning
Don’t allow your thinking to stagnate. Join a class, on some topic you’re interested in—even if it’s something not directly connected with, say, your career, or your primary goal in life. As long as you’re passionate about it, you’ll benefit from this intellectual stimulation. Its positive effects on your main interests may surprise you.

9) Migrate to warmer climes
If you’ve got a bad case of the blahs, or are stricken with cabin fever, strike out for new territories. Exploring an undiscovered country can revive your outlook on life, an inspire you with new ideas and new influences. Take a vacation, or even consider making a permanent move, if you really need a fresh start.

10) Count your blessings
Never forget to remind yourself of how blessed and, ultimately, how happy you really are. Consider it an added bonus if your dreams come true; if they don’t, right away at least, you’ll enjoy the challenge, at the very least.