I was talking to someone in the industry yesterday, and it became apparent to me how quickly things get outdated in technology! It is a challenge for a software professional to keep themselves updated on two fronts: the technologies and the industries. In this blog, let us look at how this constant churn plays out in the life of a Software Tester, as we look at “Software Testing: Future-proofing Your Career”.
I would look at the learning aspects in three aspects broadly for a software tester:
- the foundational aspects of software testing – the desired characteristics of a tester, the methodologies, and processes
- the technologies
- the domain, business, and industry aspects
If we look at these aspects from a future-proofing perspective, we will see that the first one, the foundational aspects, has not changed much in the past decade. What was relevant as Software Testing is still relevant today, though some ways of doing testing have changed a bit because of the process changes in the software development life cycle. I don’t see a big challenge or anything disruptive happening in this space in the near future.
The technologies aspect is the most disrupted one, that is often changing. One would wonder if it is worthwhile to even invest a significant amount of time learning these. Some baseline is certainly required. For example, we need to learn how to do prompt engineering, which is key in asking questions to a generative AI and get answers. The ways of doing things are getting changed because of technologies, and the technologies that are involved themselves are constantly changing! So this is the most challenging and crucial aspect.
Finally, the domain/business/industry aspect, which tends to change, but not so abruptly, but when it happens, it is transformational. For example, the change from a plain-old-telephone-system (POTS) to Voice-Over-IP (VoIP). Today, most of the phone calls go through data even in the mobile networks through LTE. Who would have imagined measuring a phone call in megabytes instead of the number of minutes?!
So, what should a tester do to future-proof their career? My personal opinion is to split your learning and skills into the three aspects mentioned above, and divide them into 20%-30%-50% respectively. I would still place highest importance on learning your domain well (50%), so that you are in for a long run. Second comes the technology aspect (30%), which cannot be ignored, followed by testing methodologies and practices (20%) which have pretty much remained constant over the decades, but very important in terms of learning the fundamentals of Software Testing.
Ready for the career ride? Reach out to me if you would like to have a chat on how to train your organisation’s employees on Software Testing and Software Quality, and/or discussing “Software Testing: Future-proofing Your Career”. Glad to help!