{"id":569,"date":"2013-01-23T15:37:53","date_gmt":"2013-01-23T23:37:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/?p=569"},"modified":"2013-01-23T15:37:53","modified_gmt":"2013-01-23T23:37:53","slug":"yet-another-future-of-testing-post-yafotp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/yet-another-future-of-testing-post-yafotp\/","title":{"rendered":"Yet another future of testing post (YAFOTP)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was talking with a colleague<\/a> of mine this morning about his role and what it meant, and I made a mental note to blog about some of my ideas. Given that my ability to remember anything peaks at about a day, I thought I better write it down now. I predict there will be a lot of holes here \u2013 I’ll fill those in later or in the comments \u2013 but here goes.\n<\/p>\n

Regardless of how you feel about the health of software testing (which depends largely on your ability to interpret a metaphor), for me, it’s getting easier and easier to see that testing is changing<\/em>. Granted, it’s changing along with the software under test, so if you’re testing the same sort of desktop software products you have been for years, using development practices even older, the good news is that you’re safe \u2013 your testing world probably isn’t going to change either.\n<\/p>\n

The rest of us are working on software that releases quickly and often, using development practices that support that cadence. In our world, it just doesn’t make sense for a test team to invest a bunch of time in functional testing. It’s cheaper and more cost efficient to have the programmers who write the code write tests to verify unit and functional correctness. This eliminates unnecessary back and forth, and forces programmers to write more testable (and often simpler) code from the beginning, resulting in easier maintainability and extension of the code.\n<\/p>\n

Of course, you don’t need to tell me that it’s a long leap from functional correctness to usable software. Given a beer or two, I’ll give you names of products I’ve worked on that have been near functionally perfect, yet near failures in the market. This gap is where my future of test lives. Another colleague (one with no blog) says, “We can define what programmers do, and what program managers do fairly easily. Testers do the <\/em>remainder.” This statement remains correct \u2013 even if “the remainder” is a moving target.\n<\/p>\n

One big role falling into the remainder is that of data analysis \/ data science \/ data interpretation \/ whatever you want to call the analysis of customer data rolling in. As products move more and more into the cloud, there are more and more opportunities to run tests and analysis in production and get data in near real time. I honestly think that the ability to provide actionable product insights from terabytes or more of data is the key to a six-figure plus paycheck for decades to come. Some testers will fit naturally into this role \u2013 but I have a hunch we’ll find a lot of people in this role with backgrounds in Mathematics or Statistics than from Computer Science.\n<\/p>\n

When you think about “the remainder”, there’s another big hole. I think we’ll always need people to look at big end-to-end scenarios and determine how non-functional attributes (e.g. performance, privacy, usability, reliability, etc.) contribute to the user experience. Some of this evaluation will come from manually walking through scenarios), but there will be plenty of need for programmatic measurement and analysis as well (e.g. is there real value in manual performance tests, or manual stress tests?). I don’t know if there’d be more or less specialization than there is today, and don’t know if it matters\u2026but it may.\n<\/p>\n

There may be other new roles, while some roles abundant today may go away \u2013 although not immediately, as I still see several openings for “Functional Test Engineer” on a popular job site. Short story is that I’m cool with this future. Others may not be, and that’s ok. I’m just happy to ride the wave.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was talking with a colleague of mine this morning about his role and what it meant, and I made a mental note to blog about some of my ideas. Given that my ability to remember anything peaks at about a day, I thought I better write it down now. I predict there will be…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=569"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}