Test Development

Test and development engineers usually refer to testers with development capabilities.

As DevOps and agile processes have recently been widely adopted, software testing, especially automated testing, has developed rapidly. DevOps hopes to establish a fast, frequent, and reliable integrated delivery process; Agile requires continuous, timely, and comprehensive feedback on the quality of deliverables. As an important link in the R & D process, whether software testing can achieve the goal of rapid response, effective measurement, process automation, and system integration will have a far-reaching impact on the R &D efficiency and product quality of the whole organization. 

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In recent years, agile development processes such as Scrum and XP (Extreme Programming) have become increasingly popular. Shift - LeftTesting and TDD (Test Driven Development) have received more and more attention. Aside from the usually developer-led UTDD (Unit Test Driven Development), ATDD (Acceptance Test Driven Development) requires testers to have more participation and insight in requirements analysis and system design to be able to design highly available Use case scenarios are used to drive more precise requirements and more comprehensive designs, to promote a unified understanding of requirements among relevant stakeholders, conduct peer review, and ensure the smooth progress of subsequent development work.

With the increasing complexity of enterprise software systems, many companies choose the architecture of microservices and the technology of front-end and back-end separation, which brings more testing needs in terms of automation, performance, interface, and security. In addition to DevOps, the application of continuous integration and deployment-related platforms, the container and virtual machine cloud services introduction, and the development and maintenance of platforms, tools, and environments related to these tests require more skills. As an essential part of quality measurement activities, we foresee that automated testing will have the following trends in the future, bringing a significant change for automated testers from simple tool users to platform developers.

Process integration

• Use a unified platform to complete test design, script development and debugging, execution scheduling, statistical analysis, report display, and other activities;
• Realizing seamless connection with other DevOps and CI / CD tools and playing a role as an organic part of the whole R&D system.

Centralization of assets

• Centralizing the management of test scripts, test data, voice, statement, pictures, and other assets of AI test, and realize sharing at the organizational level;
• Connect the test equipment hardware to the cloud to perform centralized management and remote access; Use virtualization technology to build different types and versions of operating systems and browsers, start and destroy them on demand, and realize sharing at the organizational level.

Test Servitization

• Providing a convenient test management page or interface, including anyone other than testers, who can quickly initiate a test in the specified scope and environment at any time;
• After the test is completed, the test results and analysis reports are generated and distributed on time, measurement and evaluation are completed, and the basis for subsequent work arrangement and decision-making is provided.

The famous consulting firm Capgemini and Micro Focus jointly released the global quality report 2020-21 at the end of 2020.1750 QA / test managers, CIOs, and other IT executives from 32 countries and 10 industries participated in the survey on the development trend of software testing and summarized the main trends in the testing field, including QA team is gradually transforming into Quality Coordinator; The proportion of automatic testing is rising; Continuous improvement of the test environment and data management; The role of AI technology in testing continues to rise. These trends point out the direction for software testing practitioners and put forward higher skill requirements.

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This is the best time for test engineers, as manual testing is of the past, no less capable and paid than developers; the worst for test engineers, where many big companies have outsourced labor-intensive repeat testing to third parties to hire a relatively small number of premium talent with more professional skills.

So as a test engineer, you should improve your comprehensive skills in testing to adapt to the development trend of software testing.