The State of Testing in 2015

[Ronan Healy]

The State of Testing 2015 Report was released recently. It’s a comprehensive review of the global testing industry by Practitest and QA Intelligence.

I thought it’s worth highlighting a few interesting aspects of the report and see if you agree with the findings or not.

Hiring
Small companies (with up to 10 employees) are 10x more likely to hire a tester with no experience than larger companies with 100+ employees.

Automation
Generally the smaller the company, the greater the number of automation engineers. Companies with 500+ employees had the smallest representation of automation engineers with only 4.2%. Automation is also increasing as a precentage of the work of testing teams.

Test Documentaion
According to the survey the use of test documentation is decreasing. Test plans are still the most common documentation that testers write.

Skills to Be A Tester
When asked about what skills are essential to becoming a tester, the top three (rated as very important) were Communication skills, Automation/Functional skills and Web technology skills.

It’s a very interesting report. One thing that stands out was that automation is clearly becoming a more popular method of testing year on year. It makes sense. I wonder though what the largest companies are doing instead of automation tests?

The fact that web technology was listed above mobile as a necessary skill for testers seems strange as mobile was one the things highlighted by test managers in the report as one of the things they look for when hiring a new tester.

So what do you think? Does it all seem reasonable to you or do you think the survey is missing anything?

[Niels]

It’s all about testing, inward looking, rather than about what testing is for.

[Paul]

Hi Niels, what would you like to see from such a report?

[Author]

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