The 2020 State of Testing survey aims to provide insights into how the testing profession develops and to recognize testing trends. 2020 is the seventh year that this survey is carried out:
The State of Testing™ initiative seeks to shed light on the current status of testing, and analyze the trends and challenges of our profession.
The survey is open through January. It is organized by Joel Montvelisky from PractiTest, together with Lalit Bhamare from Tea-Time with Testers.
The key takeaways from the 2019 State of Testing report were:
- Testers still need to be versatile and take up work in additional tasks and realms.
- People keep moving to testing from other jobs or positions; testing is an attractive career that is flourishing in the eyes of the industry.
- Testing teams are getting smaller year after year.
- Agile keeps being the most relevant development approach; DevOps has passed waterfall and is now second.
- Testers blend different types of testing techniques as part of their work.
- Organizations are shifting their testing, expanding both left and right.
- There is increased collaboration between test and dev; the lines between teams are getting blurrier with time.
InfoQ interviewed Montvelisky and Bhamare about this yearly survey on testing.
InfoQ: What main developments and trends have you seen over the years in testing?
Lalit Bhamare: The main development that I consider worth noticing is non-testers participating in testing activities. I believe that because of rising awareness for building quality products right from the beginning, the importance of having quality-focused mindset is picking up. And that warrants all roles within the team to understand how they can help achieve a better quality product. Participating in testing seems to be the way teams are experimenting with this.
Joel Montvelisky: For me, the main development is a move towards a more professional testing profession that is more in tone with the ever-changing development processes. We can see it in a number of places like the adoption of CI/CD as a tool of the testing team, the adoption of leaner forms of documentation, the shift to working in smaller teams, etc. I think this is pointing towards a closer relationship with our development peers and more aligned testing process overall.
InfoQ: What has changed and what’s new in the 2020 survey?
Montvelisky: Interestingly enough, we actually took out some questions that we thought were not providing valuable information; we did this in order to make the survey shorter. But we also added a couple of questions, following up from questions from last year, that refer to the ways in which we are expanding the testing process (right, left, etc) to cope with the challenges facing our teams today.
Bhamare: On top of what Joel already mentioned, I think we are also curious to see how exactly "non-testers participating in testing activities" trend is catching up and how exacty it is affecting the testing profession as such.
You can participate in the 2020 State of Testing survey; anyone completing the survey will receive a complimentary copy of the State of Testing 2020 report once it is published.
