Why the Software Engineer in Test career is SO important today!

I remember in the 80's where we would write software in Assembly Language and pride ourselves with the fact that literally EVERYTHING from each iteration in the code to the modem protocol error checking with XMODEM-CRC?and beyond was written by a single or small group of people that understood the entirety of an application end-to-end as it was very simple.

Fast forward to the monolith design principle where there would be one OS and a ton of services/apps that would work together which you would now need to manually test feature integration changes usually during a release cycle which could take months.

It was a painful process and eventually the creation of the "Manual Test Engineer" was born to handle such tasks.

Today, ALL software, if you are relevant, exists in a large distributed system. Whether your product sits on a thin atomic Linux host with n number of Docker containers or with a proper Kubernetes environment, the concept of Eric Brewer's CAP theorem is firmly a reality which we must address.

In a distributed system, a service is either CONSISTENT or AVAILABLE. As async independent components touch a variety of services either you take the time to establish a series of locks that will guarantee consistency which is expensive from a time perspective or you are available to which we simply can't guarantee state.

A successful organization, large or small, must today consider a serious Test Automation Framework that properly handles the known integrations from n number of components as they touch each other in a distributed way where state can be furiously unknown by the human Developer.

The birth of the Software Engineer in Test is the saving grace to a successful Development project such that the SEiT will work hand-in-hand with their Developer counterpart to ensure with every merge a current integration suite can be run which will be housed in a nightly CI/CD pipeline to provide a path for scalable infrastructure and growth minimizing release cycles or in a more sophisticated environment, alleviating release cycles altogether.

I can spend days lecturing about this subject but wanted to take no more than 3 minutes of your precious time to open your eyes to the amazing new career prospects of the SEiT and how vital this career path is and hopefully encourage the best and the brightest to join this path!