Common search engine questions about testing #7: “Is software testing a good career?”

This is the seventh of a ten-part blog series in which I will answer some of the most common questions asked about software testing, according to search engine autocomplete results (thanks to Answer The Public).

In this post, I answer the question “Is software testing a good career?” (and the related questions, “How is software testing a career?” and “Why choose software testing as a career?”).

Reflecting first on my own experience, software testing ended up being an awesome career. I didn’t set out to become a career software tester, though. After a few years as a developer in the UK, I moved to Australia and started looking for work in the IT industry. Within a couple of weeks of arriving in the country, I landed an interview at Quest Software (then in the Eastern suburbs of Melbourne) for a technical writer position. After interviewing for that position, they mentioned that the “QA Manager” was also looking for people and asked whether I’d be interested in chatting with her also. Long story short, I didn’t land the technical writing job but was offered a “Senior Tester” position – and I accepted it without hesitation! I was simply happy to have secured my first job in a new country, never intending it to be a long-term proposition with Quest or the start of a new career in the field of software testing. As it turned out, I stayed with Quest for 21 years in testing/quality related roles from start to finish!

So, there was some luck involved in finding a good company to work for and a job that I found interesting. I’m not sure I’d have stayed in testing, though, had it not been for the revelation that was attending Rapid Software Testing with Michael Bolton in 2007 – that really gave me the motivation to treat software testing more seriously as a long-term career prospect and also marked the time, in my opinion, that I really started to add much more value to Quest as well. The company appreciated the value that good testers were adding to their development teams and I was fortunate to mentor, train, coach and work alongside some great testers, not only in Australia but all over the world. Looking back on my Quest journey, I think it was the clear demonstration of value from testing that led to more and more opportunities for me (and other testers), as predicted by Steve Martin when he said “be so good they can’t ignore you”!

The landscape has changed considerably in the testing industry over the last twenty years, of course. It has to be acknowledged that it’s becoming very difficult to secure testing roles in which you can expect to perform exploratory testing as the mainstay of your working day (and especially so in higher cost locations). I’ve rarely seen an advertisement for such a role in Australia in the last few years, with most employers now also demanding some “automated testing” skills as part of the job. Whether the reality post-employment is that nearly all testers are now performing a mix of testing (be it scripted, exploratory or a combination of both) and automation development, I’m not so sure. If your desire is to become an excellent (exploratory) tester without having some coding knowledge/experience, then I think there are still some limited opportunities out there but seeking them out will most likely require you to be in the network of people in similar positions in companies that understand the value that testing of this kind can bring.

Making the effort to learn some coding skills is likely to be beneficial in terms of getting your resume over the line. I’d recommend not worrying too much about which language(s)/framework(s) you choose to learn, but rather focusing on the fundamentals of good programming. I would also suggest building an understanding of the “why” and “what” in terms of automation (over the “how”, i.e. which language and framework to leverage in a particular context) as this understanding will allow you to quickly add value and not be so vulnerable to the inevitable changes in language and framework preferences over time.

I think customers of the software we build expect that the software has undergone some critical evaluation by humans before they acquire it, so it both intrigues and concerns me that so many big tech companies publicly express their lack of “testers” as some kind of badge of honour. I simply don’t understand why this is seen as a good thing and it seems to me that this trend is likely to come full (or full-ish) circle at some point when the downsides of removing specialists in testing from the development, release and deployment process outweigh the perceived benefits (not that I’m sure what these are, apart from reduced headcount and cost?).

I still believe that software testing is a good career choice. It can be intellectually challenging, varied and stimulating in the right organization. It’s certainly not getting any easier to secure roles in which you’ll spend all of your time performing exploratory testing, though, so broadening your arsenal to include some coding skills and building a good understanding of why and what makes sense to automate are likely to help you along the way to gaining meaningful employment in this industry.

You can find the first six parts of this blog series at:

• Why is software testing important?,
• How does software testing impact software quality?
• When should software testing activities start?
• How is software testing done?
• Can you automate software testing? and
• Is software testing easy?

I’m providing the content in this blog series as part of the “not just for profit” approach of my consultancy business, Dr Lee Consulting. If the way I’m writing about testing resonates with you and you’re looking for help with the testing & quality practices in your organisation, please get in touch and we can discuss whether I’m the right fit for you.

Thanks again to my erstwhile review team (Paul Seaman and Ky) for their helpful feedback on this post.

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