Skip to main content

Testers of past be the IT stars of the future?



Been noticing two a bit conflicting themes lately.

1. Testers getting (or pushed) to be more technical and write test automation code

2. Articles listing future IT core skills as widely non-technical

So whereas many testers are moving to work more on test automation, the vital skills of the future may be such as:
- Creativity
Analytical (critical) thinking 
Activlearning with a growth mindset 
Judgment and decision making
Interpersonal communication skills
- Complex Problem Solving

Which sounds almost like a list of vital skills needed for an exploratory tester. 

So we should perhaps remind the ones starting a testing career or moving away from it, that also these skills are something that can be quite valuable in the future as well.

Maybe even the most valuable.

Comments

  1. First theme is a gut feeling, but to some extent backed by changes in testing and development conference programmes (testing getting more technical, development more soft).

    Second is what I've been noticing in my different feeds, but can be backed up by google search "future skills of IT work" returning stuff like: https://www.engineering.com/JobArticles/ArticleID/16807/4-Cornerstone-Skills-Engineers-Need-for-the-Future-of-Work.aspx and https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2019/04/29/the-10-vital-skills-you-will-need-for-the-future-of-work/

    Or this all could be social media algorithms feeding my confirmation bias. Hard to be sure about anything these days.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Testers doing test automation - is that the most important thing for you to do right now?

I've been thinking quite a lot about tester's moving to do test automation.  Lately beause of these three things: 1.  European testing conference , a great testing conference I attended couple of weeks ago. It is very cool due to many things; the way the speakers get compensated, the focus on the conferring side of conferences making it very easy for people to discuss stuff, the way the talks are chosen, and because there are also a lot of developers joining. So anyway when I was talking with several of the attendees, it was a bit strange how it was easier for me to talk about the product development as a whole with the developers, where as with the testers it more naturally moved into talk of automation and tools. Also on the open space, I think the majority of the topics pitched was automation or tool related. And quite little on the process or on the customer facing side of product development.  2. In my company there are a lot of different products and...

Testing drunk

(My first blog writing ever.) I've been thinking a long time that it's funny how many bugs I find by accident. Try to do something, make a mistake and boom - a bug is found.  Making the mistakes intentionally doesn't quite work - that's why they are called accidents I guess.. So I've thought of ways to make myself more prone to accidents, coming up with an apparent one; testing drunk. TUI (testing under the influence). So this I gotta try. More to come on that later.

Six reasons why testers should do code reviews

I have had quite a lot of discussions about code reviews. Quite many also with testers, by which I have understood that many do not do those. I will not start arguing here on whether code reviews are good/important or not. But I will list a few things why I think testers would benefit of doing them. 1. Code is the only documentation that is up to date . If you really want to know how something really functions, you want to be able to see and read the code. 2. Knowing more about the thing done enables you to do better testing . You can spot things that you should definitely test, and things that you probably don't need to test that much. Like extra things added by coder, usage&modifications of existing functions, data types, etc. And to arguments thinking that one loses their "independence" as a tester by knowing too much, I would worry a lot less about that than about testing stuff that you have no idea on how it has been built. 3. Improve logging . I obse...