Why I Switched my day work from Programming to Automated Testing? Part 2: More Fun

Challenging work brings fun; High Productivity leads to Satisfaction.

Zhimin Zhan
7 min readJul 20, 2022

--

The articles in this series:

The city where I live is not big, so I sometimes bumped into a few programmers I had worked with or mentored before who now had job titles of “Principal Software engineer” or “Architect”. They were surprised that I came to work as an automated tester (short-time contract, usually I decline renewals). To them, software tester (manual or automated) is a low position compared to programmers, especially for me, an accomplished developer. Some even tried to convince me to take a programming role, but I declined firmly. The reason I explained to them was: “I am just fine with it”. The real reason is: “Automated Testing is much more fun than coding in a typical web project”.

I am not trying to offend programmers here as I am a programmer myself. It is work environment, support and constraints that usually limit a programmer’s creativity greatly (see below). I enjoyed creating software tools such as TestWise (testing IDE) and…

--

--

Zhimin Zhan

Test automation & CT coach, author, speaker and award-winning software developer. Help teams succeed with Agile/DevOps by implementing real Continuous Testing.