It’s graduation time. Several bright minds are ready to go and face the world. This excerpt from Steve Jobs’s famous speech for the 2005 graduating class of Stanford University is still very relevant for the aspiring testing graduate today:
“Here's to the crazy ones. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.”
Testers are meant to see things differently, and they should aspire to be collaborative trouble-makers and question the disrupted world.
Testing professionals like me, who graduated in the late ’90s, would know that testing methods then were highly process-oriented and black box-focused, with no automation. Those methods have evolved into a world that needs continuous testing to meet deployment needs, from months to days.
Here are the key skills an aspiring tester graduating now should think about.
Business and domain skills: DevOps means anything that eliminates bottlenecks between development and deployment. Without understanding the unique needs of domains, it is impossible to design an appropriate test strategy that drives validation activities upstream.
Architecture skills: Think modular, open, abstraction, and service. Build object-oriented, service-oriented architecture, microservices, and middleware skills to test early.
Infrastructure, cloud, and virtualization skills: Test environments are typically the largest bottlenecks in testing. Understanding automated environment provisioning, cloud architectures, and environment virtualization can improve the delivery pipeline by 25 percent or more.
Native programming languages: Coding skills in native programming are necessary to move away from user interface-based test automation. Developing non-UI-based automation frameworks using proven data-driven, keyword-driven, and hybrid automation frameworks will be the way forward.
Agile testing skills: Building competencies on lightweight test processes, toolkits, and guidelines to drive adoption of agile frameworks such as Scrum, kanban, Extreme Programming, and SAFe will be necessary. Learning tools to drive complementary test-driven and behavior-driven automated testing also will be a must.
Continuous delivery: Developing skills with tools that deliver continuous build and integration and extending them to testing frameworks to drive continuous testing is critical.
Traditional testing tools: Leveraging existing tools and frameworks using proven tools such as Selenium, UFT, Performance Center, and LISA solutions is still important. The key will be to automate tests that shrink deployment time.
The testing professional graduating now will always need to be mindful of change. Willingness and the desire to disrupt how things are done by being the right round peg in a square hole is most important; the ability will follow.
