Moving from development role to testing role

LowOdour

folks,
I have been a software developer for the guts of 10 years. At this stage I want out! I have been getting more interesed in testing the last couple of year. I obtained foundation ISTQB cert, have some minor experience in test automation but largely testing consisted of manual integration/system testing.

On paper, it doesnt look like i have huge testing experience so unsure how to apply for testing roles.

Anyone have similar experiences, or able to give any.advice?

Idleater

As a developer did you practice test driven development / test driven design? I'm guessing (hoping) you have experience in writing unit tests for your own code and scenario tests for any bugs found.

From a test perspective you could outline how you would approach a test role having development experience. You may know how to find interesting workflow flaws in design/implementation that a tester without a coding background might not find.

You could also highlight any soft skills that you gained as a developer that apply equally to any team.

That's for a start.

dazberry

Look for SDET roles - Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET). You can carry your dev experience but use it in a way more test focused way. Might be better than throwing that experience away and trying to reset the clock.

D.

matrim

Would an test automation role suit? This way you would be using your development experience to write automation tests

bpmurray

Watch out: the way the industry is going, the concept of someone who is focused exclusively on test is on the way out. The agile way is to do TDD and unit testing delivered by the developers, with other testing done by early betas.

Buford T Justice

bpmurray wrote: »

Watch out: the way the industry is going, the concept of someone who is focused exclusively on test is on the way out. The agile way is to do TDD and unit testing delivered by the developers, with other testing done by early betas.

^^This

Its getting more and more popular for people to be testing their own code these days. Testers are starting to die out / merged into dev roles

14ned

Buford T Justice wrote: »

^^This

Its getting more and more popular for people to be testing their own code these days. Testers are starting to die out / merged into dev roles

That's half true. You're right that traditional dedicated test teams made up of "mediocre" and usually much less paid programmers who shadow a primary dev team are dying out quickly. Nowadays dev teams are expected to do TDD or as a minimum write and maintain their own regression test suite (and sometimes their own Jenkins servers to run those tests per commit), and be judged as a successful or failing team on the basis of that.

However what is not mentioned yet is how specialised and well paid high end test engineers have become. In Silicon Valley, specialised test engineers earn on average a bit more than a top end developer because reliability and quality has become so much more important than it once used to be. Google, for example, have a whole division dedicated to testing, and they have their own blog at http://googletesting.blogspot.ie/. Test engineers live in a world with a vast array of test tooling just as diverse as development tooling - most noticeably there is very little overlap in that tooling: developers and testers are increasing two totally different software specialisations.

Let me put this another way: modern test teams write unit tests for their tests! And they use big fat test frameworks like Robot Framework and other stuff with as steep a learning curve as the whole of the Python language i.e. it takes years to master them.

Of course, how much of this professional testing culture is in Ireland is unknown. I speak of all of the above from when I worked in North America. I haven't seen a whole load of it over here, but I assume things are catching up here.

Niall

youcancallmeal

There seems to be a lot of automation testing roles out there at the moment if that would interest you. I'm a deveoper but I'm writing a lot of automation tests at the moment and its certainly a role more suited to someone with a developer background rather than your average tester

LowOdour

Hi folks,
thanks for all the replies.
I think the general consensus is the the role of test engineer is changing. Most positions I see are for Automation Test Engineers. Its definitely an area I'd be interested in getting in to, but it I do lack in certain skills.
Things like TDD, Agile development, automation are only starting to be spoke about in our teams now, so I would lag behind in those areas.