The 2019 State of Testing survey aims to provide insights into how the testing profession develops and to recognize testing trends. 2019 is the sixth year that this survey is carried out:
The State of Testing™ initiative seeks to identify the existing characteristics, practices, and challenges facing the testing community today in hopes to shed light and provoke a fruitful discussion towards improvement.
The survey is open through February 2019. It is organized by Joel Montvelisky from PractiTest, together with Lalit Bhamare from Tea-Time with Testers.
The key takeaways from the 2018 State of Testing report were:
- The testing profession is evolving, with testers expanding into tasks and areas previously far from their professional realms.
- On the other hand, testers and their tasks are far from being irrelevant, and/or absorbed by the Dev Teams.
- The flow of new testers into the profession is still strong, and we also see experienced testers staying for very long and fruitful careers.
- The role of a tester does not remain around inspecting quality but it is also evolving to advocating it and accelerating it by educating other "non-tester" roles.
InfoQ interviewed Montvelisky and Bhamare about this yearly survey on testing.
InfoQ: This is the sixth time that the survey is done. What main trends in testing have you seen over the years?
Lalit Bhamare Adopting agile has been clearly visible, but I am more excited about certain findings which we don’t know yet that are clearly a trend. For example, testers going beyond their traditional role, getting into leadership/management positions, impacting the quality mindset across the organisation and not just within the team, effectively contributing to whole team testing efforts, and developing internal tools to support testing or contributing to testability of software being built itself.
One thing I can certainly say is that the importance of testing is spreading beyond the "checking" aspect of it.
Joel Montvelisky: I think that the interesting question here is what trends we are not seeing (even though many people would have expected to see them happening).
We obviously see a trend of agile adoption, but on the other hand there are still a stable and important number of organizations running waterfall projects in parallel to their agile ones. I think this is because we have products in the market that have been running for many years and people do not like making changes in the middle of a large and on-going project.
We also see that the number of new testers only continues to grow, and this is something that may sound strange to people asking themselves if we will still be testing in 5 or 10 years from now...
InfoQ: What’s new in the 2019 State of Testing Survey?
Montvelisky: Every year we gather a group of testing professionals we admire and ask them to help us to review the questions as our Review Committee. This year we have a great team of people who honored us with their help. They suggested a couple of new questions around testing trends and some interesting options to the questions we have for people to answer.
But in my experience, the new things usually come from the answers, as the most important thing about this survey is that we can see the trends that are affecting our industry, by analyzing the responses we get year after year to similar questions, such as adoption of methodologies, or the use of different technologies, or even the challenges affecting testers.
Personally, I am really interested in seeing how the testing tasks are being shared with non-testers, and also what challenges are people sensing as part of their jobs today, and comparing this to the answers we got in previous years.
Bhamare: New things we usually find when we get interesting and insightful answers to questions we have been asking from previous surveys. Our review panel indeed gave us interesting insights into some foundational questions which we apparently were missing. But I won’t spill the beans here now and would let our respondents find more about it :)
You can participate in the 2019 State of Testing survey; anyone completing the survey will receive a complimentary copy of the State of Testing 2019 report once it is published.
