So you want to be a Tester, what do I have to do

It helps to be a Alpha/Beta Tester if you have some knowledge of programing. This will help you, or give you an idea off what you should be doing, to illustrate we will look at a small program, which is designed to add two numbers together and produce an answer on screen, or by some other method of output.

Right so we run the program and you enter in "2" and it asks for the second number, and you enter "2"
the program then outputs "4"  so you conclude that you have tested the program and pass it fit for purpose.
Have you done a good job of testing the program. No in fact you have not even scratched the surface.

What you should also be doing is saying to yourself, what happens if I type a letter instead of one off the number's how does the program respond? Does the program have code to check for valid input's. What happens if you enter in punctuation or a minus number does the program cope with each off these situations correctly.

These and other things the program should cope with, we have only looked at one simple action of a calculator program, with each level that the program reaches their are many and varied ways of checking them, this is what Testing is all about, can you crash the program if you can the programmer has not done his job.