Software Testing profile is a thankless job - It’s a myth

“Software Testing profile is a thankless job - It’s a myth”

How many have you experienced it?

I am pretty sure, many of you…. Irrespective of being a Project Manager, Director, Delivery Manager, or department Head...?have faced or facing this problem in spite of how big or small the size of the company or technology used.

When we try to hire or put in testing project a fresher or 1-2 years’ experience people, it's a challenge.

Let me explain the rationale

From the last couple of years even now, when we interview any fresher or 1-year experienced professional in the project; during the initial discussion, their first point is I want to do development work not testing as my aspiration is to become a developer.

When asked why? then the answer is - no future in testing profile.

Do you know why this perception? Because from many years, trend was being made such a way that testing used to given least priority and people has started considering Testing profile as thankless and low profile job. If u don’t get anything then only take this profile

I would say it’s a myth now- many people may start questioning after reading this post what?

Yes! It’s a Myth.

Let me elaborate ...

If we can go back and start seeing the software testing journey, we can very well see that, as technology evolved over a period of time, the testing profile also has evolved but mindset and perception didn’t change about the testing profile because in the market we can only see the precedence was always given to developer than testing?irrespective of its value BUT

There is always an other side of a coin and we always not ready to understand that part and started creating an perception based on the market and CROWD. Now, if we can see the testing profile very closely,

we can realize it’s also evolved, from manual testing, and automation testing to SDET profile - (Software development engineering test) – This is a high value and most demanding profile now a days –

Testing profile has vast exposure, responsibilities and respectful profile, if we can take it positively as if Testing team say NO to any product or provided signoff that will not go to production.

Testing/ quality?team is an quality gatekeeper. Even some of the cases CEO of the company come to the testing/ quality team to check how could we proceed further. So now understand the gravity of the testing team.

If we can see the V&V model- in each phases testing team is involved and?also because of shift left approach and automation demand we can see all the phases from the beginning automation and everywhere testing team is being involved and their input and signoff is needed

Business Requirement- Acceptance testing cases being designed and automated as part of final regression

System Requirement - BDD framework is getting used and that is getting validated by the functional or automation team both from function and automation testing prospective and automated for regression use once integration testing is being done.

High Level design – UI/UX testing and integration testing being done either with automation tool or manual testing

And after development is done- based on the environment structure- tastings are being performed in various environments mostly-?integration, QE, UAT and Production environments

As automation is needed everywhere therefore,?nowadays fully functional testing profile is very limited. Mostly it's a Functional + Automation profile and after the selenium functional?automation platform is in place, all the testers became a developer as it’s a platform and everyone needs to have a good programming language -developer level experience in any language (Java, Python, C#). Due to this skill, testing team also contributing on integration testing and helping the organization to achieve shift left approach goal.

Also thanks to the no code, low code tools to help the functional tester to become an automation tester with minimum coding knowledge but help them to think, learn and customize the tool as needed with respective programming skills and become a programming expert in a some period of time. This also gives freedom everyone to learn the automation for the automation learner aspired people to fulfilled their aspiration along with CI/CD, and cloud computing trend, its mandate for ?testing team ?to know, how to run and configure CI/CD jobs and analysis the logs. Now a days expectation from testing team to look into the code and provide the logs from the application or server. Configure and Execute the API’s. So it’s no longer a standalone team anymore.

Now days freshers are mostly attract with the buzzed words like DevOps, AI/ML ( Artificial Intelligence or Machine learning). The functional work was there earlier in different forms like DevOps was earlier mostly called as release management and AI/ML - Analytics. So now, for testing these areas are also need coding experience.

So, in a nutshell, SDET profile is a kind of full stack developer – I would say one step ahead as they are even strong in application knowledge and quality gatekeepers for the application success

Therefore, testing is ?no longer a thankless JOB…. It's a PROUD job if we think differently and positively. It’s all about the mindset. I will cover that topic in my next articles how positive mindset can help to achieve success