Which path should QA engineer choose for survival ?

Change, Change, Change!!! Which all changes should I Adapt? Which one do I need to land the job, to impress the client or work-space, to prepare for the future? Which programming languages should I learn? Which technologies should I master? Is there a Ready Reckoner? Help!!!

After reading the Title of the blog multiple thoughts would have started coming up in mind right?

The question arises “are we on track, are we heading in right direction?”

The current trend of IT Industry demands automation out of QA engineer so that it helps us to minimize the retesting/regression effort as well as it has other benefits. Currently QA engineer having automation skill set is the desirable one. One thing which worries me “how long will only automation skill set help us to survive in the era of robots? with Cobot coming are automation QA engineer safe?”

Definitely NO, because we already have a concept of #ScriptLessAutomation and #RoboticProcessAutomation popping up in industry.

How is Script-less Automation helping?

Below are the major benefits of Script-less Automation( SLA )

1. Requires one-time effort of Automation Experts to define the architecture & design the solution, class libraries, custom keywords etc.
2. Ability to keep up with increased product workload without any increase in resources.
3. Time to automate gets reduces by up to 40%.
4. Ability to keep up with increased product workload without any increase in resources.
5. Designed for Maintainability.
6. Saves the cost of building skills for scripting.
7. Eliminates coding that is tool specific.

How is Robotic Process Automation helping?

Below are the major benefits of Robotic Process Automation( RPA )

1. Accuracy & Quality
2. Scalability & Flexibility
3. Continuity/Tirelessness of machines
4. Productivity & Efficiency
5. Higher Speed and Throughput
6. Security
7. Continuous Learning & improvement

In short, we can say both RPA and SLA helps us to get better Automation test coverage, as a result we get a better-tested product without having much coding expertise.

“What will be expected from a QA after 2- 3 years? ”

With the evolution of RPA and SLA, there will be a significant amount of job cut for automation testing position in the near future. So what should we do in order to make sure survival is easy for us? I can propose a solution, as there are new jobs getting created due to DevOps/RPA/SLA so definitely a QA engineer having good knowledge of new and helpful tool are on a safer side. Also we can develop tools based on project need, so software development skill will be expected from QA engineer because there might be some limitations of SLA or RPA or other similar tools which are coming up.

With DevOps evolving QA will be an invisible link between Development and Operation team, we can help our team to deliver Quality product by contributing to Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. As well as moving ahead QA’s might be involved more into Requirement understanding/Discussion phase( which ideally BA does for us now ) and collaborating with Ops team, in order to make sure environment configuration related issues doesn’t pop up in production.

Bringing it all together

I feel mostly everything from the Software Engineering book, requirement analysis, designing testing automation solution, automating test cases, deploying test suite. And also almost every role within a project development like BA, operations, tools expertise, coding skill, along with basic QA role. In short, we have to adapt and evolve with good changes, QA will have to build up cross-functional areas competency and contribute at every level. Coding skills will be expected from QA as it will always help us to be on a safer side if there are limitations of tools.

The industry will keep on evolving. The early we are aware of the upcoming changes/trends in the industry, greater will be the benefit we will be getting out of it. Like Agile believes in inspect and adapt approach we also need to follow the same kind of approach in order to be part of the change or in bringing new changes in the industry.

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Thank you!