Summary : The responsibilities of testers have become more diversified from whether a single software system works and meets business needs. Testers are going to participate in software development in the whole process and let testing activities run through the whole life cycle of software development.

The Career Path of Software Testers (Part 1)

In the article What is everyone concerned about software quality, we learned that the new key trends in the field of software testing are mainly reflected in the following aspects:

AI Development and Software Testing
Agile and DevOps
Automated Testing
Environment and Data
Cost and Efficiency

Source: Lin Bingyu

With such a trend, what are the changes in the career path of testers? Let's take a look at the technical development direction of testers.

Technical Path

Based on the new trend mentioned above, the responsibilities of testers have become more diversified from whether a single software system works and meets business needs. Testers can participate in software development in the whole process and let testing activities run through the whole life cycle of software development. Therefore, the professional development and technical path of testers are:

Agile Test Expert
Senior Test Development Expert
Expert in Specialized Testing
QAOps Expert

1. Agile Test Expert

Agile testing emphasizes early testing and frequent testing. Testers need to be able to intervene from the requirements analysis stage, participate in the whole process, and work with the whole team to realize that the team is responsible for quality. The skill requirements for agile test experts include:

Domain testing capability: Testers need rich business knowledge, strong business sensitivity, and business understanding. As well as being familiar with various types of business models, including emerging business IoT, intelligent services, blockchain, etc., and able to formulate corresponding test strategies to effectively assist the team builds quality and maximizing the delivery value.

Automated testing capability: Automated testing is a necessary condition for agile development, and automated testing skills are the necessary skills of testers. Testers should understand the advantages and disadvantages of different automated testing frameworks and be able to guide the selection of project automation tools; understand the idea of test layering, and help the team to formulate appropriate automated testing strategies; Developers participate in the review of the underlying automated testing (interface testing, unit testing, etc.); understand continuous integration tools, and be able to configure and run automated tests on the continuous integration pipeline, to become agile testing experts.

Communication and coordination ability: Agile testing requires the team to be responsible for the quality. Testers, as the main force, need to take the roles of quality analysts and coordinators, requiring the ability to communicate well with different roles and coordinate teamwork.

Source: Lin Bingyu

2. Senior test development expert

The necessary skills of senior test development experts require advanced automated testing, white-box testing, development and platform construction capabilities, strong test code writing capabilities, and the ability to develop automated testing tools, build automated testing frameworks, and build automated testing platforms and service.

At the same time, it is best to have basic algorithm application capabilities and natural language processing skills for AI applications. It is necessary to understand and master AI-related knowledge and the application of AI knowledge in testing to help realize the intelligence of automated testing.

3. Expert in specialized testing

The Specialized testing skill set includes cross-functional testing skills such as security and performance. It needs to have solid basic computer knowledge, understand the types of security problems, the advantages and disadvantages of security testing tools, be able to provide security testing solutions; Be familiar with performance influencing factors, performance testing concerns, and provide performance tuning schemes.

Specialized testing skills also include the management of test data and test environments. It is required to be familiar with data processing technologies such as virtualization, cloud computing technology, and data anonymization and be able to provide test data and environment management solutions.

4. QAOps Expert

The right shift of testing has been paid more and more attention, which means that testing activities need to be moved to the production environment, and testers need to cooperate more closely with Ops personnel. QAOps experts also came into being. QAOps experts need to understand the technology and practice related to infrastructure, log management, log monitoring, and log analysis technology. At the same time, they also need to have the ability of user behavior analysis. Through cooperation with Ops, they can make full use of various types of information in the production environment to optimize the software development and testing process to achieve the goal of ultimately optimizing business value.

Click here to read The Career Path of Software Testers (Part 2).