What keeps you on the Testing career path?
I have recently seen this question on a testing club, and it was interesting because it's been bugging me for a while. We also brought it up on one of our Lean Coffee meetings at the QA Community.
What this is about: mainly, as you gather experience (assuming you're starting as a manual tester), after years and years of manual testing, you start wondering what more is out there to keep you engaged, challenged and interested in the testing discipline.
This all comes down to your own character in the end, and it depends what makes you happy: why is that project boring, is it because of what you actually work or more because of who you’re working with? But generally it’s a little bit of both. So from different reasons people get to the point where they ask themselves what is missing from their working experience: is it more challenging tasks or is it more meaningful interaction with other people? Both of the aspects can take many shapes, and many of us choose different path forward.
As i was reading around and what i know from my own experience, when people pass several years of experience in testing, they get to a point where it becomes routine, boring: they have been passing through a wide range of types of apps/websites, got the chance to use a (more or less) wide range of tools. And now it only boils down to changing project to apply same process, use same tools, and there is nothing exciting about it. Because you rarely get the support from the management to explore new opportunities.
However, even when you have the luck to work on a project where you have the support and resources to try something new, do you know what you want? Or what you could consider? Most people want to learn and switch to automation, which could truly keep you busy and focused for several new years. And others look forward to higher hierarchical positions - leadership, or soft skills paths like coaching. But the latter is a little bit like moving away from the actual Testing, as some say, cause soon enough you lose touch with the actual skill of testing.
There would be some other options though, that would keep you into testing. For once, the certifications. But again they're just a step forward, not a destination.
Or Focusing on more technical kind of advancement rather than soft skills and become a technical guru: learning more programming to help with automation, or getting into more technical types of testing (security, performance, DB testing, API testing etc). This can further develop into Testing Architect, which would allow you to develop full testing frameworks (from integrating test management tools with the continuous integration system, designing both manual and automation strategy and building them up).
Or Becoming a Settler: which means, be the person that is able to set the structure of a project, agree with the clients on the testing stack, put processes in place, coach people and work on the project until it becomes stable. Then move on to the next project. This can be exciting and always be in the busy stage, but you can also burn out and not get to feel like you belong to some actual project. And you need to have a lot of knowledge to be able to do it, in all the fields of testing.
Or working close to teams to improve and revolutionize the testing process: we all know the overload of generating and maintaining documentation, or the slowing down for taking someone onboard, or the reporting issues, or organizing best the tests between the team members, or finding a way to increase the test coverage and minimize the bugs from early stages. And it's hard to find the best way to do it because it depends from team to team, chemistry, communication skills, clients involvement etc. And it needs a person with experience to find the perfect amount of each ingredient to make the testing process work. Or maybe invent a new way? You could be that person! All the conferences around the world are basing their presentations on these kind of people.
And this could also go hand in hand with building an independent testing team.
Or mix up into the DevOps team.
However, it's very hard to find testers with 10+ years of experience that are still testers and do just that, test software. But i think it's kind of similar for developers, right?
I am not being judgmental, i don't think one choice or the other is better or worse, people are meant to grow, to evolve, so it's not something wrong if you change career, nor it is if you remain in the field. It's better for all of us if everybody does what he loves, rather than what he's supposed to do, or what you've started with.
So what's it gonna be for you?
