State of Testing 2016

Recently I have posted the State of Testing Survey 2016 survey conducted by PractiTest and now the survey results are out.

State of Testing survey 2016 has been biggest ever, with the participation from over 1,000 professionals from 61 countries!

Following are some of the key takeaways from this report.

Testers report to a number of departments in the organization:
Its interesting to see that percentage of people submitting the testing function reports to Project Management and to the Development Manager than to the VP or Director of Quality.

Testers Approach towards Testing:
Almost all the testers prefers Exploratory / Session based testing than any other testing approaches.

What do testers do with all their (spare) time?
Mostly we do documentation and managing the test environments.

Testing Documentation – Mind Maps are becoming very popular among the testers compared to high level test plans and other documentation techniques.

Is every second tester a test lead…?
There is a similar number of Test Leads, Managers and Directors, as there are Test Analysts and Test Engineers.
We have just as many leads as we have testers. But where are they leading us to? 🙂

QA:Scrum Master: Also a large number of respondents who are, in addition to working as testers, also fill the role of Scrum Master in their teams.

Skills – More importance to things like Mobile Technologies, Web Technologies, Agile Methodologies and Customer Facing Skills. And the most important skill is Communication Skill, which is even higher this year than ever before!

To Keep up to date – More and more testers are turning to social media in order to keep up to date with their testing knowledge!

Test Team Challenges – Hiring is Extremely Challenging and Training is also Challenging.

What do Managers look for when hiring a tester?

1. Ability to think outside the box.
2. Passion ate about testing
3. Scripting knowledge
4. Understanding of Agile
5. Understanding of the relevant technologies
6. Good writing & communication skills

Predictions to the Future:
We see that most people want to stay in the testing arena within the next 5 years,
although an important number of respondents want to work as Test Managers or Test Consultants.

Job Stability – The stabilization trend we started to see last year is only increasing, and so
people are less concerned in general about their job stability.

The report also contains Plenty of good testing gatherings, not only the very large conferences.

To Read the full Report : Download State of Testing 2016 Report

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