Testing: a clear career choice

This is a translation of the article .

Back in June, I read with great interest an article by John Stevenson, which discusses career growth for testers. At that time (and still), the article hit me hard because similar issues started to be raised in my current company.

Translator's note: A small digression and a few words about that article. The article provides different statistics on testers - gender (75% of men, although, in my practice, I would say that female gender prevails), development method (coincides with this article) and salary. The latter surprised me very much, because, if you believe her, testers on average receive the same or more programmers and developers, which clearly diverges from my experience (in addition, the article emphasizes that it is smaller, although the numbers say the opposite) .

After some worries about the involvement of employees, I (the head of the testers), as well as the other heads of the functional part (software development, project management and technical development), started talking with all my people within our competencies. We have developed a set of questions aimed at obtaining a real picture: their current view on their career and their role in the company.

Firstly, it was great, just getting around and talking to everyone, and secondly, talking with all twenty testers gave me a pretty good idea of ​​where the problem areas are.

John Stevenson in his article writes: “Yes, XXX was such an excellent tester, but he was forced to go to the developers in order to be able to develop in the company” and I heard this phrase several times in one form or another. In our case, it was a transition either to the developers or to the project managers. Both options were considered as the only real progress for the tester. // Translator's note: it’s not entirely clear why the QA Engineer -> Senior QA Engineer -> Lead QA Engineer path is ignored. But I leave it to the conscience of the author.

It made me sad.

Then, when I studied the data better, it became clear that the majority of testers, whom we hired as graduates a year or two ago, are now interested in switching to developers, while testers with 3-5 years of experience look in the direction of managers.
So why do our testers with less than two years of experience want to go to the developers? In the future, it became apparent that the company is committed to frequent product releases; a significant increase in test automation is noticeable. We always devoted a lot of time to automated testing, but now more than ever. The combination of short preparation time and emphasis on quick releases has led our new testers to do mostly automated testing and dumb manual regression testing.

Manual Testing == Research Testing


Perhaps the desire to change the field of activity is the result of a narrow view on the role of testing. When testers were asked about exploratory testing, some of them claimed that they did it every release, but it was very boring and they just did the same thing again and again.
It was at that moment that I began to connect the dots. The real problem was probably that even if they knew about the existence of other areas of testing, they did not understand what these areas really were. For example, in their eyes research testing == manual testing, so if their only opportunity to prove themselves as a tester was to run regression testing on pre-compiled lists, it is not surprising that they wanted to leave the ship!

Therefore, perhaps the real problem is education. As a company, we have been working hard on more frequent releases over the last couple of years, and we encourage teams to adapt their working methods to more flexible conditions in order to be more effective. As a result, most of our team works at full capacity most of the time, which leaves no time for training and development. Of course, there are some people who find time in order to learn something new, but we should look in general - “time” is a barrier in this equation.

This was confirmed by many testers when they were asked if they had any progress in the learning process. Their frequent answer was: “No, I don’t have time” or “There is no time during the day to do this.”

Knowing you do not know


As a direct result of this study, we look at how we can introduce preparation time into projects. There are lessons that can be learned from Google, removed 20% of the time and our own experience, so we are confident that we can implement something at home. Work on this continues.

But this alone will not solve the problem. How can you learn something if you don’t even know what it is - what you need to know. There is a certain thing in knowledge within your role, but you do not know what exactly. Maybe you consider yourself an experienced tester when, as you, in fact, just do not know about some areas of your role. This may seem absurd, but imagine that you had few contacts with the tester community, outside of your small testers' team bubble, or even the entire company. Then your idea of ​​your role will be much less, and cut off to the skills that you need daily. If we adopted the approach of software masters, then we have many students, very few apprentices, and even less masters. This means very few opportunities for mentoring.

This leads me to another significant difference between developers and testers, which I suspected for a long time, and which was confirmed by our data. A developer usually played a computer as a child, learned a computer better at school, continued his studies in the field of information technology, and possibly even received a degree at a university and all this in order to become a developer. The desire to develop something is their passion and they usually do programming all their time (at least until marriage, children and the like).

Testers do not have a higher education in software testing, there are no testing classes at school, and I am sure that no one had a burning desire for a child or teenager to become a software tester. It is sad to realize that a fair number of testers (and I, too) used to get this job because they lacked the knowledge or perseverance for the developers. The skills needed for testing, such as curiosity, attention to detail, the ability to look at the big picture (as well as many others) are the features that I always had, so, fortunately, everything was fine.

Nevertheless, I think that software testing is currently considered as a good career in its own right and many companies do not now consider this as a bad development path.

But I want to say that without this burning desire to be a tester, the new tester must learn from scratch all those skills that include the role of testing.

And this is the place where we made a mistake. In my company, developers and testers are treated on an equal footing, and indeed many skills are common. However, new testers may pay much more attention to explain the roles and skills they need.

Skill Map


In an attempt to open the eyes of our testers and shed light on the skills that the testing role covers, we have put together a skills map. The center of the map is a set of those basic skills in which every tester should have at least basic knowledge. After four quadrants diverge from the center. These quadrants determine the directions that a person could take. He would still remain a tester, but he could already determine what form of tester he could take.



By explicitly viewing a set of core skills, such as research testing, test methods, reporting problems, pair testing, test automation, intentional practice, providing feedback, etc., it becomes much easier for the tester to determine what he should focus on. It is very important that core skills are learned, practiced and refined before thinking about specialized skills.
This scheme is used in personal development conversations between testers and their supervisor to help them find strengths and weaknesses and form a goal for further training.

We have experienced this with a few people, and we are still doing tuning and optimization. But this tool looks promising to help with career discussions.

It is hoped that some of the novice testers will look at the core skills section and identify a few areas that they need to improve.
Of course, this is a long way and we do not claim that this scheme will answer all the questions, but this is only the beginning.

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