Do All Testers Need to Become Technical SDETs?
The modern testing market is increasingly more agile and more technical. You see more and more companies recruiting for SDETs.
It is expected that technical QAs be able to shift testing left and assist in automation efforts.
You might not have to become a full developer building complex applications, but you will need to be technical enough to understand how an application works end-to-end.
As a tester you need to get involved in technical discussions, help with code reviews and assist with writing automated tests.
That being said, we should not lose sight of our most important facet, which is driving the quality initiative and acting as quality advocates for our team.
In order to be able to act as a quality mentor, we need to incorporate many skills. While we specialize in testing and quality assurance, we also need to have a broad knowledge in other areas.
A “T-shaped” tester would have a specialism in:
- Front-end Testing (UI automation, UX, Accessability)
- Back-end Testing (APIs, Microservices, Architecture)
- Toolsmithing
- Security and Penetration Testing
- Performance Testing
- CI/CD pipelines
- Test Strategy
- Exploratory Testing (Heuristics and Oracles)
and have skills in other areas such as communication, negotiation, etc.
The post by Callum Akehurst-Ryan delves much deeper in the above topic.
Continue reading Do we all need to become SDITs?