Down under, Dean Cornish has been having a hard time finding qualified QA engineers, and in his recent blog post, he ponders why that is.
In his post, Dean throws out a lot of possible reasons for this problem, but the end of the post gets to the heart of the matter for him:
Off the top of my head I cannot recall a single university in this country that talks about a career in testing as an equally viable career choice in the same vein as development. Even though in the workplace, I’d argue that testers have an equally as important role as developers. This discrepancy contributes to our lack of growth in mature and capable candidates, leading us to see the same poor candidates going from shop to shop and always somehow getting through the front door.
It is as though testing has become the place for people who fail at being a dev, a system analyst or business analyst or if you can pull a visa and need something where the demand is so great that the quality of the screening is frequently wavered to get “warm bodies” through the door.
Maybe the situation is different in Australia than in Austin, but I’m not sure I see the same dearth of qualified candidates. And as for Dean’s concern about testing not being seen as “an equally viable career choice . . .as development”, as far as I can tell, that’s always been the case. If anything, this situation might be better than it used to be as the software industry has matured.
I’d love to hear others’ thoughts and experiences.
I’ve just put together a collection of blog posts talking about the lack of good testers so good to read your viewpoint on it and I’ve added your blog onto the end of my list.
As a dev turned tester I found it difficult, some of that was because I lacked the magic ISEB words on my CV, some was because I was on a programmers salary and had to drop to get a testing job
I also started a post on the Software Testing Club to see how people got into testing, from the stories so far it seems that it’s something a lot of people find by accident rather than choose