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Why should you become a Tester-Developer? - The software industry needs them bad. The demand is high and there are few.
- The high demand is an indication that the industry is moving away from the waterfall mentality to a more agile environment where testers are involved earlier and need to understand and write code for testing.
- You will likely make better money because you will be a better tester.
- It will be easier to get jobs with testing AND developing skills.
I hear the question quite often: What is a tester-developer? Steve Rowe sums this up quite well: "Test Developers are the heart of a modern test team. There was a day when you could get away with hiring a few people to just use the product and call that a test team. This is no longer the case. Products are becoming more complex. The lifespan of products is increasing. More products are being created for developers instead of end users. These have no UI to interact with so simple exploratory testing is insufficient. To test complex products, especially over an extended lifespan, the only viable solution is test automation. When the product is an API instead of a user interface, testing it requires programming." What do you have to lose? Pick your poison, C#, VB.Net, Java, JavaScript, TSQL, Python, Ruby, or whatever is applicable to your company or to your interest. Find a few books, use tutorials on the Web, and most of all just start writing code. Keep the future in mind; what do you think you're going to gain my learning Cobol? Do you think that will be applicable in the next job you take? Be patient and don't rush, learning to program isn't a fast or easy process. This message was brought to you by the Push to Become a Tester-Developer Foundation (PBT-DF) where we've been pushing testers to become tester-developers since...well, since you started reading this blog post. Be all you can be join the PBT-DF. |
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