Review of Software Testing Masterclass (2019) - From Notice to Expert Udemy course

Introduction¶

I do QA work for my job and love learning new things, techniques or ways of doing my job better. The Software Testing Masterclass (2019) - From Novice to Expert caught my eye during one of Udemy's many sales. This course is only five hours long so I figured it'd be a quick overview (and I'd be able to skip of the 'novice') part of the course. It was created by Ozan İlhan. Their Udemy biograph says they have been a professional software tester for the last 10 years.

Course¶

First things first, English is not the instructor's first language. In most of the course this is not a problem, but be aware that there are some grammatical things that may throw a native speaker. Normally, I wouldn't count this against the instructor, but they specifically call out in the course description:

All videos have hand edited subtitles. We spent many hours to correct all the subtitles to help you to have a smooth learning experience.

Unfortunately, those subtitles are exactly what was said, so the grammar issues are even more glaring.

The "high-quality sound" that boasted about in the course description doesn't seem accurate. Sound from one lesson to the next varies wildly. In one lesson it is difficult to hear the instructor and in the next they are super loud.

OK, on to the actual content.

I felt this course did not take the "to Expert" part of the name to heart. Much of the content was power point slides being read to the student. The "Novice" portion of the course was laying a groundwork for students to understand the different types of testing, software development life cycle, how to report bugs, and how to build test cases.

The instructor provided a template for bug reporting and test case checklists. I cringe a little bit because these are Excel documents, but I've worked in the corporate world and Excel is the hammer used to pound every nail. I've seen and used templates that look very similar. It's not flashy or "an app", but it is what's used "in the real world", even if I hated using it at the time.

I think the "Expert" part of the course is labeled "Advance Testing Concepts", which covers different types of tests in more detail. This covers, black box testing, smoke and sanity testing, reggression testing, risk based testing and a few others. Unfortunately, this is presented as Power Point slides again.

The last real content in the course is covering how to sign up for various things like GitHub, JIRA, TestRail and TestLodge.

Finally, the course ends with what feels like a bunch of advertisements for freelance testing services. There are very brief overviews of uTest, Testlio, and BugFinders.

Final Thoughts¶

Overall, I am disappointed in this course. I was really hoping the "Expert" part covered a bit more or even new methods. Unfortunately, everything here I've heard of and used at one point or another.

Additionally, I'm really disappointed that so much of the course was being read a Power Point presentation. I was hoping to see some testing frameworks in action to compare/contrast the benefits of one over the other.

Due to the over use of Power Point though, and the last part of the course feeling like plugs for various services, I can't recommend this course.