2020 and beyond …The Role of a Tester
While the Agile, Scrum, DevOps and Continuous Delivery has become the norm in the current business context. Everyone is focused on delivering new business value faster. Software can be built and released a lot quicker than before. This has huge impact on old school testing strategies and professions.
The activity of the tester in 2020 will focus more on continuous monitoring and reporting deviations in production. Monitoring the impact ,a code change has made is one of the most important activities in testing. It will help the organisation in visualizing the real value of the solution. Like more users or sales, all depending on what quality attribute you want to measure and is valuable to measure.
Besides visualizing the quality, testers should steer quality by actually solving the root cause of problems instead of informing about the symptoms. That can be either solving ambiguity in specifications or technical implementations like code complexity or redundancy. Making sure those problems will not happen again.
Quality comes from quality minded people. Having a shared responsibility in the development team towards quality and doing testing well (together) will make a difference in 2020.
Quality is in the eye of the beholder, so it is important that testing is done from different point of views. Development is getting more specialised in new technologies and frameworks. So, if we were to pick one skill testers should develop or possess, it would be being able to catch up and learn how to test these new technologies as soon as possible.
The developers will never become good testers and testers will never become good coders. The truth lies somewhere in the middle. Besides delving into requirements and ensuring common understanding between stakeholders and development teams, testers will need to become more technical to understand the risks sooner rather than later.
Testing can be taught and can result in a cultural change. So developers too can learn to understand the risk in technical implementations. Being critical about your own code and issues that can come out of it is crucial for effective test automation. We also expect developers to reach out to stakeholders and validate that their implementation actually solves the problem.