Where should I go in the 4-year test? Test or test development?

Contents: Guide

foreword

After 4 years of testing, I have not accumulated programming scripting ability and automation experience. When looking for a job, language ability and automation framework are required.

I feel that the experience accumulated by development colleagues is easy to find a job.
Next step, find a way to transfer to the development post or continue testing? ? ?

Under normal circumstances, with four years of experience as a test engineer, you should be able to reach the level of an intermediate test engineer.
As a junior and intermediate test engineer, whether the next step is to switch to development or continue to do testing, my personal suggestion is to do test development (in short, it is a test that understands development)!

Can I continue with the test?

The testing mentioned here refers to ordinary "manual testing". If you only do ordinary manual testing, you just perform "little bit" mechanically every day, and it is unrealistic to get a high salary.

Even though the working hours are long, most of the personnel are still at the stage of junior test engineers. And as you grow older, you will find that you are less and less competitive, and test engineers who are younger, more energetic, more able to work overtime, and more cost-effective than you can replace you in minutes.

It can be seen that this path will not work...

Can I switch to development?

Whether you can switch to development depends on your actual situation, so what kind of situation is suitable for switching to development?
What situation is not suitable?
If you have a strong programming ability and are interested in coding, you can switch to development, and after doing development, you will have a deeper understanding of the underlying principles of the program, coupled with a more rigorous style of doing things when doing testing, It can make the code implementation more comprehensive and detailed.

If it has been four years of testing work, but has not accumulated experience in programming test scripts, then it can also be considered that it is currently at a stage without any programming experience.

In this case, you need to carefully consider whether to switch to development, because you don’t know what level your programming ability and logical thinking ability are at, and development involves coding every day, and you are not sure Are you interested in coding in the future.

If it is indeed such a situation at present, how should we choose?

Why consider test development?

1. What is test development?
Simply speaking, test development means that you must be able to do testing and understand development.
Looking at it suddenly, wouldn't it be more stressful?
No, no, because it is much simpler to apply development technology in testing positions than in development positions (unless there are some special scenarios).

From a risk point of view, the risk of switching from testing to testing development is lower than directly switching to development. Because the transition from testing to testing development can be slow.

For example, you can learn a programming language first, and then learn a UI automation testing framework, so that you can start doing automated testing. Really good for programming.
If you really have good coding skills and are more interested in coding, then you can develop in the direction of pure test development.

2. Why is test development important?
Just imagine that a tester who doesn't know anything about development can't deeply understand the logic of system implementation, so it's unrealistic to test all the problems in the software!

So there are a lot of test development jobs in the market

Open the major recruitment platforms, we can see that there are many positions for test development. If test development is not important, why are so many companies recruiting test development employees?

Why do you say that test development can get a high salary?

Test development positions have higher skill requirements for software test engineers, not only testing skills, but also development skills. Always believe that there is no shortage of high-paying jobs in today's society, but a lack of talents who can get high salaries.

At present, the work of test development mainly includes the development of test tools, the development of test platforms, and the construction of test frameworks. These tasks can serve ordinary testers, improve the efficiency of testing, and create value for the company.

On the one hand, the test development market is scarce, and on the other hand, it can indeed create value for the company, resulting in very high salaries for test development. The annual salary of test development posts in first-tier cities is basically 450,000+!

How to move towards test development?

How to become a real test development engineer, what hard skills do you need?

On the route of test development, more specialization and comprehensiveness are required:

Improve the testing technology system: Linux, docker, shell, SQL, Python/java, Django, Vue
lay a solid foundation for automated testing technology:
web automated testing: selenium test framework; PageObject design patterns, principles, drills;
APP automated testing: Android automated testing Framework; appium advanced application principle analysis; APP automation test combat; test framework packaging transformation; ios automation test;
mobile special test: robustness test, weak network test, crash detection, power consumption analysis, etc.; mobile terminal performance test; mobile Terminal security testing;
interface automation testing: interface protocol and packet capture, proxy technology and mock; interface automation testing framework, HTTPrunner testing framework; dubbo interface automation testing; interface management tool swagger, interface security testing docker container technology: docker container, docker
image ;
continuous integration/continuous delivery/devops: jenkins continuous integration; Jenkins continuous delivery;
…

The following is the most complete software test engineer learning knowledge architecture system diagram in 2023 that I compiled