The Road to Testing: Insights from Four Years of Testing and Development Work at a Large Factory

experience

I did two years of testing and development work in two large factories, let's call them factory N and factory A for the time being. Responsible for game automation framework development, special testing tool development, version quality assurance, Devops platform development, and also led a small team. Every factory and every job strives for breakthroughs. The process is hard, but naturally the results are very satisfying and they all achieve good performance.

Tested job positioning

Although in most of the projects I have experienced, the positioning of test development is "testing", the structure in Factory N will be more special, completely separating test development and business testing. Test development is more about testing platforms and performance improvement related work ; the business is relatively simple, and the entire team will work together to build tools and platforms from the perspective of quality inspection to address pain points in functional testing and R&D to solve pain points in the R&D process and testing process.

Looking back on this experience, it is still very meaningful: I am very dedicated in doing things, and my technology has also grown a lot. The only drawback is that it is difficult to accurately quantify whether these tools and platforms have truly improved the business in a more substantial way. In the later period, I also did a lot of quantitative work and built quantitative data models; so I entered the Devops track, learned a lot of Devops concepts, and built some wheels. Of course, a person's energy is limited. In a cost center, it is easy to get started with Devops, but it is almost impossible to implement a complete set of Devops.

Later, I started to work with the business. I can clearly feel that the level of business leadership has improved, the communication skills have improved, and quality input and output are done more from a quality assurance perspective. It can be regarded as a personal experience of QA. The "not easy" nature of the job: I have a deep understanding of it when I sit at my workstation and the pot comes from the air.

The collision of two different experiences gave me a more in-depth reflection on the position of test development, including the value of the position, core competitiveness, and industry development.

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Test the core values

Since the positioning of test development is also testing, its core value can be summed up in one sentence: paying for quality, preserving product value, and reducing process costs.

Testing is essentially a test sequence . No matter how powerful the testing technology, testing platform, or testing tools are, don't let these so-called "high-level" technical terms obscure the truth. These automation and platform tools are ultimately designed to output quality in a shorter time and at a lower cost, and then (here is the key point) pay based on the quality of the output. To put it bluntly here, these things you do are of course meaningful, but if you think outside the box and look at it from the perspective of a boss or a project manager, all you want is quality results and who will pay for these results.

There is always someone who needs to pay for the results and the process, and the core value comes out. As a member of the test sequence, the most important thing is to pay for quality. This gave rise to why testing should be responsible for process management and shifting left to right. It is rare to see development mention moving right to testing. The content of the testing position is naturally complex but not refined: you are not a very qualified project manager, but you have to participate in project management; you are not a pure technician, but you have to take into account tool development during business testing. Even if individual projects or companies require testing, they must be responsible for the quality control of the requirements.

Therefore, most of its existence in a bill-paying position does not produce direct commercial value except output quality, and it has become an energy-saving and emission-reduction department burdened with costs. That is to say, paying for quality, preserving product value, and reducing process costs mentioned above.

Career bottlenecks discovered through testing

After participating in many projects, I have become more and more aware that platforms with different dialogue dimensions can better reflect the powerlessness and anxiety of testing positions. After you understand the core values, when talking about development and industry depth, you will find very practical problems:

The core front-end and back-end business logic and code of some projects are kept confidential, or only the tip of the iceberg is open. It is difficult to truly get a full picture of the business and is not conducive to personal long-term growth;
As a cost preservation department, the test sequence naturally has to shoulder a lot of dirty work. The fragmented time and authority barriers make it difficult to form a complete value chain like making a product. Without a value chain, there is no personal value;
Test meetings on the technical route revealed that most of the pure test development technologies serve QA or a small group of people. These systems have not been standardized for development management, nor have they been massively verified by external networks. The depth and breadth of the technology cannot be seen from the perspective of upstream development. , not worth mentioning.

Self-upgrade

Get out of the limited miscellaneous thinking, break the boundaries and try to do more professional things.

If you are good at communication and use the overall quality management awareness that testing already possesses, you can move closer to the project management level and become a real project management position. Project management with a quality mindset at least at the entry level will surpass most non-professional project management.

If you like to work in technology, you may switch to a more upstream development position or a R&D position with a certain threshold in the field. You may focus solely on technical thinking and planning, and have a deep understanding of core technologies and deepen your knowledge in architecture and other directions.

Don't stop at the downstream tracks. Although every track has its prospects, you must also know that in addition to hard work, you also need to look at the course of history.

at last

I still want to add that the biggest insight in the past four years is not only about work, but also about the overall and essential way of looking at the development of a thing in terms of thinking. Today's test track is certainly comfortable and simple, but these are the icing on the cake, but they are all in vain. How many things with output value have the industry's major manufacturers actually put into practice and accumulated? unknown. You might as well think about it, what exactly does the test opening position bring? What exactly does this track exist for?