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With discussions happening lately on whether testers should learn to code, the ongoing debate over the ISO 29119 standards and the increasing popularity of approaches like Agile, it seems like the role of the tester is evolving all the time.
Looking ahead, do you think that the average day for a software tester will change?
Five years in the future, will agile be standard practice? Will mobile testing be the dominant role of software testers?
Do you think developers and testers roles are likely to integrate further or will software testing become a even more specialist area?What are your own thoughts?
Testing will be there alright, only what kind of testers will there be?
During EuroSTAR we had an interesting discussion that testers should much more integrate with other development roles and we are even thinking to start our first peer conference about quality / testing where all the different development roles will attending. So yes, we need to discuss the role of a testers, not the necessity of testing…I’ve been fortunate enough to get a taster of things to come. Sitting down next to a developer whilst we hashed out BDD scenarios directly in the IDE prior to writing a line of code. Very cool indeed.
In 2019 I believe testers will be working directly with multiple customers to help design and execute tests. Active customers are rewarded for their involvement in this process. For this to become a reality though, tools and process to enable cross role collaboration must be present. This requires a paradigm shift in mindset for both the product development team and key stakeholders in the business.
External customer collaborated test design can only really happen if internal test design is seamless. How testers / developers / product owners / BAs / stakeholders collaborate with each other is key here. Again, technology will be the enabler of this and once internal test design is seamless then the natural progression is to start reaching out directly to a pool of customers who are willing to give up their time to help shape the tests.
This doesn’t mean customers become testers. This would be like saying anyone can test when we know full well there is a huge difference between checking and testing. Customer led test design will use customer data, behaviour, direct feedback and interaction to help influence tests and the majority of requirements. This of course balanced against how the business wants to grow their product(s) when a customer isn’t sure what they really want.
There’ll be no difference between a ‘requirement’ and a ‘test case or scenario’. As these two terms become redundant they morph into ‘experiments’. Experiments are established to learn about a product. So customer led test design will eventually be referred to as ‘Customer Led Collaborative Experiments’ (CLCE)
The terms ‘automated testing’ and ‘manual testing’ will no longer be in use. The automation/manual enlightenment will demonstrate that it’s pretty much impossible to automate the mindset of someone who is good at testing. They’ll just be the terms ‘checking’ and ‘testing’. Automation will aid testing but will have not replaced testing. Checks will be automated. I’m hoping by this point development teams have stopped obsessing over creating ‘automated tests’ for ‘everything’. This enlightenment creates the impetus, space and capability to shift focus onto CLCE and this is where it gets even more exciting as product innovation cycles grow exponentially.
Critical to this is the technology that will enable such collaboration yet I believe we’re already on the path to increased understanding, sharing, collaboration, simplicity, and transparency – and these are key ingredients to building successful relationships . I’m excited about the future of testing and how intimate customer relationships and experiments will become the norm for the tester role of 2019.
Pretty much everything that I talked about at this year EuroSTAR webinar on ‘Testing as a Service’ – Models
Couple of days I presented to our TQA practice on the future of testing:
– Skynet (Onenet) Artifical Intelligence 2.0
– Social Intelligence (Enterprise Gamification / Crowdtesting)
– Becoming a Data Scientist (Quantum Teleportation / Mechanics for Testers)Some of the core changes to the data ambassador role (formally pigeonholed as tester):
– Ban English (too ambiguous) especially for requirements definition.
– Ban Email / IM / Phone legacy communication methods with no social enterprise outcomes (brain models / meta languages)Think ‘Minority Report’ think ‘Prediction’ not historical trending and small data. Pass your drone license for Testing in the Wild flying test drones with Internet of things devices attached when SV / NV falls short.
Do all the assurance activities (including testing) from day zero minus one including specialist security/performance/mobile/in the wild testing before the themes or epics have even been fully defined.
Don’t wait for the air traffic control system to fail in live prove the Business on a Page (consisting on average 3 to 5 thousand enterprise applications/services) before they have even decided what technology or platform to implement it in!
5 years time will pretty much like what everyone should be doing now :0) plus what James said this year that there will be no applications (UIs) merry Christmas everyone hopefully Santa will bring you a test drone and then just wait for Skynet
@jonathon Very interesting stuff. The social intelligence/gamification does sound like where a lot of software industries are headed.
I’m also hoping Skynet don’t visit this Christmas!
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