I have seen a trend for #testers to focus more on automation skills. I have experienced that #automation skills in #testing are valued much more than any other activity in testing. It could be that the promotion of Automation is on such a high pace that no other activity in testing gets the limelight or maybe other activities don't get discussed or noticed in the project. Result of this is that most good testers without automation skills feel that their skill is not up to the mark. Even interviews are not getting conducted if you don’t know any automation tool. Many testers are in the testing industry just for automation and the question “how much automation is there in the project?” is often asked in the interviews. For candidates interested only in automation, from my experience I can say this is only a part of the whole picture. If you are interested only in programming using the latest tools, using the latest framework ,configuring pipelines then probably development or dev ops would suit you better. I can’t act as if I knew better. I was also in the same mindset for years. I used to learn about the latest automation framework, latest tools to automate things etc. Then I asked myself if automation is the only thing in testing that requires some thinking. What activities other than automation am I talking about ? Learning the product, sensemaking, bug reporting, progress reporting, understanding users, communication with stakeholders, understanding the big picture, understanding the architecture of the application, understanding value that project brings, domain knowledge, critical thinking, exploratory testing, debugging, learning how to investigate failures , how to analyze logs and many other activities that counts for being a better tester. here are some more blogs to get you thinking about the topic : https://lnkd.in/d-y8-qej https://lnkd.in/duJeJze9 https://lnkd.in/d3v7hPdC I have more references if anyone is interested. Thoughts on my jibber jabber ?
I dont know why you guys are so much hyped about Automation and Functional. Some posts I see favoring automation, some I see favoring functional. Cant we all just stick to one trend and that is problem solving? Engineering is all about problem solving, doesn’t matter who you are tester, developer, etc. Given your activities, lets take one example, Bug Reporting: Consider in your org, people are using excel to log bugs, and now there is a sudden change and you started moving to JIRA, would you manually go and create all the bugs in Jira or would you create an automation script to push to Jira from excel?
Continuation - 3/3 As an organization, I don't care who tests the product. What I care is testing is done and I get confirmation that things work before release. I want to know that requirement were met, they work as expected, customer will be delighted to receive the update, it will increase the user experience and user will get what was promised to them, they will be happy and will continue to have a relationship with my company. Can developers test - YES. Can Prod Dev test - YES. Can each member of the team test - YES. Should we need people who will oversee and be accountable for test - YES. Should I invest in test - YES. Should I invest in automation - YES. Know the big picture. Don't look at things from "your role" point of view. Look at how my role plays a part in the big scheme of things. Regarding salary etc, learn to negotiate. Don't take up low salary if you feel you deserve more. Ask for it. Show the value that you can bring to the table. Be proud of what you do. Be proud to be a tester. Be proud of the impact that you bring to the table. Don't feel inferiority complex. Speak up. You have earned a seat on the table and act as one. Complaining doesn't help. Automation helps. Learn it.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry on this one. Maybe I'll comment more later.
This is the best kind of jibber jabber. 🙌 I often encourage testers obsessed on automation to consider, that it's getting increasingly difficult for them to stand out in the market as devs (and soon AI) can do the same job way better. If they choose to focus on actual testing skills i.e. the stuff you wrote about, they still have a fighting chance.
Most of the people just wants to showcase the automated test cases count to the clients , rather than that there should be space for automation engineers to develop scripts that would find all the possible bugs from the application. I have seen that most leads just don’t focus on the quality, they just focus on quantity.
Great post! And much needed one, actually! There are too many automation engineers who know very little about the product (among other things).
Test Automation required periodic maintances efforts, else its just fancy stuff from my POV.
Well said! In the software field, many people believe that testing is a simple task, and even developers sometimes think they can handle testing themselves. However, due to time constraints, companies hire dedicated testers. Unfortunately, this perception often undermines the skills and value of testers, as they are sometimes viewed as mere data entry or checking humans. To combat this, it becomes essential for testers to showcase their skills through automation and demonstrate the value they bring to the software development process.
Comment (1/3) - To be continued.. Some thoughts on such trends... Automation complements testing. It helps in reducing testing cycle time by way of "eliminating" the "labour" involved in doing monotonous repeatable work. Testing is very wide. Automation is a small subset which aids testing. Testing as a whole requires creativity, curiosity, intelligence, communication and a whole lot of skills which can never be automated. Take a moment to look from the sample organisation point of view. As a large organisation, you have 1000 of agile teams. Each under tight schedules to deliver feature fast. As an organization, I want to deliver feature fast and with quality in the hands of my customers / client to increase my bottomline. What options do I have? On deep thinking every organisation will put "Automation" and "Innovation" in top of their list. Of course there are many other choices but these two will be there somewhere in the top. Why? Because the outcome is clear, people understand value it brings and how it can increase the bottom line. Hence there are many jobs for automation and innovation throughout the software industry. More demand, more money etc....To be continued (1/3)
Engineering Manager | Dev Ops | SRE | QA
10moThe great flaw in this decade old manual vs automation debate is : Automation considered as if robots spit out automation code. Automation Testers are humans, and automation tests are human written code. And Based on time/capacity concerns, most of the "Automaton Suite"s are half written, where automation testers verify the system logs/databases manually for a overview. On the other hand, people calls themselves as " Great Testers, with 0 knowledge on code" are mostly lack of interest to learn the tools or code. Just like a new comer to a company understand the product, as part of "Engineering team" we should act like a software engineer. "I will attend meetings, read documents and play with Product to find flaws" minsets please understand, Customer support and Operation support non-technical members slowly replaces that area, for a cheaper pay. In a fast paced market , expenses under scrutiny, advocating QA as Non-Technical/non-coder "ThinkTank Human" causes harm more than help.