Testing vs. Testers – What’s next?

Testers’ role has been constantly evolving and there has been significant shift in expectations from testers with adoption of agile development methodology in recent past. There are various questions that test engineers are facing or at-least they are having in their minds, if not being called out explicitly.

“Are testing needs diminishing away?”

“Is testers roles shrinking or expanding?”

“How can test engineers not only cope up with changing times but lead as well?”

We may contrasting perspectives for any situation that we’re in and majorly it’s up to us on how we want to take it up and act accordingly.

There is intent as well as drive to shift-left various activities which drive quality so that any issues are detected early in cycle, having less cost to them and last but not least…quality is owned by everyone, especially who’s producing it and not someone else.

This may be causing anxiety among most of test engineers, if not all, as they will be wondering about what they are supposed to do once that happens. Some event conclude that “testing” is not required which in-turn implies that testers aren’t required.

In my view:

Testing is NOT going anywhere and will always be indispensable part of delivery. It’s the testers who have to evolve as well as expand their skills to cope up with business dynamism in today’s world.

Until 2010, there used to be manual and automated testers which completely changed in past 8-10 years and automation skills have become de-facto skill set. In past 4-5 years CI-CD/DevOps are the skills that have become de-facto on similar lines.

An engineer’s job doesn’t end either by writing or testing piece of code but should be owning it end-to-end. S/he should be having full awareness about it’s health on daily basis including the performance of new features being shipped w/o being dependent on any other role. S/he should be not only just following the instructions but also contributing to them by adding their perspective from their experience while monitoring production health as well as issues/enhancements reported by customers/users.

To achieve various objectives listed above, one needs to learn related tools as well as skills which helps him/her in expanding their roles and have win-win situation both organisation as well as themselves.

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