If 2022 is a great challenge for the whole world, then 2023 is definitely a year with many opportunities. As we all know, as the epidemic is gradually brought under control on a global scale, both the international and domestic environments will show a gradual recovery trend, and opportunities in various industries will also emerge. So, what will happen to the software testing industry in 2023?
Is the industry becoming saturated? If it is saturated, how will industry practitioners break through? If there is no saturation, what kind of person is suitable to enter this industry? Today, let's talk about these issues and talk about the mainstream trends of the software testing industry in 2023. I hope it can solve the confusion in the minds of some friends.
How will the software testing industry develop in 2023? Let me talk about a few points about the development of the software testing industry in my eyes. If you are in this industry, you will definitely understand whether I am right or not.
1. The seemingly "declining" testing industry
In view of the big changes in the past, test engineers who do not understand technology will gradually be eliminated. A wave of unemployed test engineers is inevitable.
Although I also called on people around me to get rid of the outdated business system and outdated testing skills in the early days, it is heartbreaking to see that many people are getting more and more difficult.
There are fewer and fewer demand for test engineers, and fewer and fewer recruitment positions. Typical newly emerging giant companies such as Facebook did not have QA in the early days.
Even in the past few years, there was a debate about whether the QA team deserves to exist.
As a typical example, algorithm testing in search, recommendation, machine learning and other directions is very important and requires the participation of professional test engineers. This industry can accommodate many testing teams.
However, the testing industry has not formed a correct testing method for this field in recent years, and finally lost this market. Now it's all developed by itself. Because there is no qualified test engineer to guarantee this business.
We must remember that the business space determines the living space of QA, which is a common principle in all industries.
If you can't meet the business needs, you will be eliminated. You can either choose to fall back on the defense or choose to accept the challenge.
What does the future of the testing industry look like? I personally still need to be optimistic, and listen to the analysis later.
2. Test the size of practitioners
The size of employees is negatively correlated with productivity and positively correlated with business scale. How big it can be in the future depends on the dual factors of technology and business scale.
The first is the big environmental factor. With the Internetization of various industries, the IT industry is expanding. Food delivery, nail art, and even drones, automobiles and aerospace industries will all become technology companies. The R&D team will expand, and the QA team will naturally expand as a whole. The premise is that QA itself must keep up with the times.
The second is that as productivity increases, so many people will naturally not be needed. This is true of any industry, and the testing industry is not special.
A large number of people means everyone is as cheap as a worker in a Foxconn factory. The pursuit of high added value is the right way. This is a win-win for both the company and the testing team.
The third factor is industry status. The popularity of devops promotes the close cooperation between R&D and operation and maintenance. Once this phase is complete, the production deployment of the product should be very smooth.
What follows is that problems will be exposed earlier and earlier, and everyone will pay more attention to quality. At that time, we will enter a new era, DevQA.
Operation and maintenance will gradually become pipelined, and Dev and QA will become the new protagonists. It's just that the ones who can support the overall situation at that time are not necessarily the current software test engineers, but the test engineers of the new era.
There will also be innovations at the technical level. Previous tests can only leave test cases and business knowledge documents without any continuous accumulation.
With breakthroughs in technologies such as interface testing, quality monitoring, coverage analysis, and business modeling, QA will also form its own stable and accumulative business data, and gradually form its own platform and business.
The dual factor of business space + technical threshold is a core factor that I firmly believe that the QA department can exist for a long time.
3. The management of the testing industry will gradually become flat
Almost most Internet companies are splitting business and QA teams to improve execution. Therefore, there will be fewer and fewer director positions that manage more than 100 people, and more and more directors who manage less than 100 people. It is not ruled out that a small number of Big Macs remains unchanged. Or some cash-burning startups are doing the opposite. Among them, these test managers will encounter some new challenges. For example, most of the higher-level managers are from R&D. If you don't understand the R&D system, there is almost no room for development. The test management system has lost the superstructure, and the impact on the future is still far-reaching. There will be labor pains, but the outcome will certainly be good.
4. Increased demand for testing technical personnel
There are many reasons.
Large companies because of the problem of spin-off. There is no longer a unified testing technical support department, so each team after the split needs to form a corresponding functional team, and the demand for testing technicians will increase instead.
Small and medium-sized companies also demand quality assurance effects, not only better, but also faster, and also need a large number of technical talents. In recent years, it can also be seen from the job descriptions of various recruitment websites.
5. The disaster and rebirth of outsourced testing
Companies that used to do outsourcing business in Europe, America, Japan, and South Korea will gradually decline due to the development of the domestic Internet, and they need to transform into domestic.
However, domestic outsourcing business is mostly rejected, and outsourcing business has many drawbacks in terms of efficiency, communication and management. It itself cannot bear the training and long-term development of test engineers. So in the past few years, there will be a large number of outsourced test engineers transforming.
In this regard, new and excellent outsourcing service companies are needed. Only if we have our own testing service, testing technology and senior testing research engineers.
For example, Neusoft has also started to develop its own various cloud measurement platforms, which is a change to cater to the new era.
6. Test engineers who do not understand development are already illiterate in the new era
The first is that there is not much room for advancement at work. The second is that it is also difficult to change jobs. The best results are transfer management with years of experience.
I have communicated with many test managers in the industry. Most of the people who have worked for more than 6 years will burn out in test execution and cannot get started in the improvement of test technology. It is better to recruit interns.
Relatively speaking, people with a technical foundation will still maintain their enthusiasm for learning after working for more than 8 years.
Therefore, the structure of the future test team will basically be the management model of most business test engineers + a few test experts + test managers.
7. The threshold of the testing industry has increased
In the past, it was in the development period, and the industry's demanding talents were the first. Now with the stable development of large companies, the recruitment has stabilized.
They basically only recruit from 211 colleges and universities. Social recruitment also depends on academic qualifications. Start-up companies mostly focus on financing and burning money, and they are also highly valued in terms of academic qualifications and experience. There will be fewer and fewer companies that can recruit talents in an eclectic manner.
I have recommended many students to other excellent companies before, and some of them have good skills but have not passed the education qualification. So I hope everyone can pay attention to this issue in terms of skills and education.
In addition to the academic qualification threshold, there are also technical thresholds as mentioned in the previous article. So come on, boy!
8. Salaries in the testing industry are on the rise
The testing industry will have a new life after its own purification and washing. A typical change is that the salary has been raised from the previous range of 3k-15k to 1w-3w as a whole.
The improvement of technical content and the improvement of responsibility will inevitably bring overall returns. Now as long as the technology is good, education is no problem. It is very common to get a monthly salary of 20,000 to 30,000 yuan after working for 3 years.
Salary will be discussed in detail later.
9. R&D engineers enter the testing field
In recent years, the entire industry is very dissatisfied with the development of the testing industry. In layman's terms, everyone thinks that testing is very low, but they cannot do without it.
The mood of R&D and submitting projects for testing is the same as that of going to the train station to buy tickets during the Chinese New Year. To apply for test resources, explain the business and implementation to the test, and when encountering relatively low-level or new recruits, you have to teach them by hand if you don't even know how to build the environment.
R&D is just to modify a line of code, and the QA or testing side will be fried. Various processes are enough to make R&D lose several hairs.
As a reference comparison, think again about operation and maintenance. Deploying an environment back then was very similar to submitting a test. To apply for operation and maintenance intervention, you need to apply for machine resources, then submit deployment documents, and specify the version numbers of the basic environment, dependent libraries, and other details. If you encounter problems such as the local release environment is not good, you have to fight with the operation and maintenance.
And now with the popularity of continuous delivery and devops. The release has been "silk-smooth", one-click release, free choice of grayscale, and the usual release does not even require the participation of operation and maintenance.
After trying the sweetness of the new model, it is hard to bear the disadvantages of the testing industry.
Therefore, when it is difficult to find excellent test engineers and architects, more and more companies have chosen to use R&D engineers directly.
Their quest is simple. Single test -> interface test -> basic smoke test, it can be automated. It would be more perfect if it can be made into a test as a service like operation and maintenance.
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