As those of you know who have been reading my blog I have been wading through what it means to be in test in this software industry. Things are starting to gel more and more. Through this journey I think I have a couple of statements I can make. Not fact – just my opinion.
- Stating that you are tester means more than testing software.
- I don’t believe you can retrain a mass of engineers into a role they don’t understand or didn’t sign up for.
- Telemetry is important for every engineer to grasp but you need a new set of skills in specific people for deep understanding and execution.
- Every software engineer who is worth their weight is a good tester.
- The tester gene is not in every engineer. You need a few engineers with this gene operating as free radicals in your organization.
So, now back to the question – Should you pursue a career in test? Well, the answer is complicated. Our industry and its view of the discipline makes this choice a tough one to swallow. Every day I am thinking that testing is more an activity than a discipline. Just as a lineman on a football team is better at blocking than a running back the lineman could don a different number and perform the activity of running the ball as far as he can. Everyone on a football team has certain activities that they excel at but all are football players. We could start talking about how football players are compensated and how that relates to software engineers but not all examples are parallels. I am beginning to believe that testers who solve problems with code or even started out as a Developer before becoming an SDET are just another extension of the engineering team and not a separate discipline. Separate disciplines promote fiefdom building and a struggle to not index self relevance over good all up execution to ship great products.
I just watched a great video of a talk at #CAST by Trish Khoo. Trish explains some of the experiences she has had coming from being a developer into the world of test that she now enjoys and excels at. Her talk has a lot of the discoveries that I believe take us and our discipline in the right direction. She discusses the conversation she had with Alan Page (@angryweasel) at MS on what the company is doing to embed testing as an activity that everyone does, Teams now have test specialists who solve problems with code rather than just testers who can code. On my team the SDETs are still in a separate Organizational Discipline but we are almost exclusively working just as Trish talks about. This is a great video and I highly suggest that you watch it!
I would assert that as a test specialist you can have a career in test. You have to grasp the idea that testing is a part of every software engineer’s job and find that role that embeds you in a development organization that believes in the thought that every SDE is a tester and strives to ship products to the end user. So in conclusion you need to change your mindset and you need to find a role and organization that supports the methods discussed in Trish’s talk. In a nutshell Trish explains that all software engineers need to get their code ready to be consumed by end-users and this means testing the hell out of it and building in the right questions through telemetry that help us learn what the user wants, likes, and dislikes. It just so happens that there are some of us engineers who are uniquely qualified to help get the team to this level of quality through testing experience and know how.