The 2021 State of Testing survey aims to provide insights into how the testing profession develops and to recognize the adoption of testing practices and testing trends:
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 December. It is organized by Joel Montvelisky from PractiTest, together with Lalit Bhamare from Tea-Time with Testers.
2021 is the eight year that this survey is held. The key takeaways from the 2020 State of Testing report were:
- We are shifting slowly towards a "whole team testing" or at least an "everyone in the team can test" approach.
- While Agile is used by close to 90% of respondents, the biggest increase is happening around the adoption of DevOps which is now in use by over 40% of respondents.
- Testers feel that coordinating automation and manual testing efforts, including other team members in their testing efforts, and generating good visibility rank as their top three management challenges.
InfoQ interviewed Joel Montvelisky and Lalit Bhamare about this yearly survey on testing.
InfoQ: What main adoption patterns and trends has the survey identified over the years in testing?
Lalit Bhamare: The most noteworthy pattern in my opinion has been the shared responsibility for testing within a team, instead of making testers solely responsible for testing. Testers taking on the consultation role is another key trend that I feel is catching up more.
Joel Montvelisky: There are a couple of things that are catching my eye. First of all, we are passing more of the actual testing to non-testers in our teams, while at the same time we take more non traditional testing tasks such as working on deployment process, monitoring production environments and even writing code.
At the same time, it still brings a question mark together with a smile to my face the fact that even if Agile and DevOps are the top methodologies used today, year after year we see about one third of participants telling us they still have Waterfall in at least some of their projects.
InfoQ: What’s new in the 2021 survey? What hasn’t changed?
Montvelisky: The obvious "point" that changed is that for this edition we felt the need to ask a couple of specific questions about the influence of Covid-19 on the actual work and the general feelings of testers in the community.
What hasn’t changed is the review we are doing on the different trends taking place in the testing world. To me, it is to understand more how the "slogans" of Shift Right and Shift Left are translated into actions taken by testers and their teams.
Bhamare: Joel has summarised it well. The global pandemic appears to have made an impact on the way people test and the life of a tester in general, and we are curious to find out what this impact means for the testing profession, its future and so on.
It would be also interesting to see how the current pandemic situation has affected the things we have not changed in the survey. All in all, we are curious to find it out.
You can participate in the 2021 State of Testing survey; anyone completing the survey will receive a complimentary copy of the State of Testing 2021 report once it is published.