Recently I have posted the State of Testing Survey 2017 survey conducted by PractiTest and now the survey results are out.
State of Testing survey 2017 has been biggest ever, with the participation from over 1600 professionals from 60 countries! We have 600+ more participants for this survey compared to the last year. This tells us a lot about the value this project is providing to the worldwide QA Community.
Following are some of the key takeaways from this report.
Respondents Demographics:
Indian Software Professionals contributed a lot for this survey. 23% of the participants are from India, and QA Professionals from Europe and Russia contributed to 34%. Most of them have the word “TEST” attached to their professional titles.
Where to Start?
If you or someone you know is starting his/her testing career, it is better to look for work in a smaller company or a startup firm, instead of looking for work in a bigger corporate organization.
Testing salaries around the world:
There is a jump in salaries compared to last year in a number of areas around the world, with the USA, Canada enjoying the largest gains in reported salary. On the other hand India, as a geographical area, showed similar salaries to previous years.
Testers report to a number of departments in the organization:
Again like last year, Its interesting to see that percentage of people from the Testing Function is reporting more to the Project Management and 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. People also started trying out Mob Testing as one of the test approach. Mob testing is a group testing activity utilizing one computer and voices out the tacit knowledge in the group of individuals on shared tasks.
Additional Task for Testers:
Mostly we do documentation, managing test environments and requirement gathering. So when looking for tasks that will help you to boost your testing career, try focusing on helping the documentation gets created correctly and also on more technical tasks such as managing environments and taking part of the deployment and integration operations.
Source of Knowledge for Testers to learn:
Mostly QA People prefers Testing Books, Peer Mentoring and Online Communities and forums to keep themselves up-to date.
Skills – More importance to things like Automation, Scripting and Web Technologies and Security Testing. The most important skill is Communication Skill, which is even higher this year than ever before!
To Keep up to date – More people attending more interesting conferences than last year.
Adoption of New Tools: More than half of the testers introduce new tools into their practices.
Automation:
Overall the percentages of respondents using automation remains the same than as last year with 85% of the respondents.
What do Managers look for when hiring a tester?
- Problem Solving/Curiosity/Creativity
- Ability to think outside the box
- Technical knowledge
- Understanding of Agile
- Communication and listening Skills.
- Ability to adopt changes quickly.
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.
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.
The report also contains Plenty of good testing gatherings and open answers to Our ideal testing world in the future
To Read the full Report : Download State of Testing 2017 Report
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