Testers Evolving

James McCaffrey has a post talking about the software tester "prestige" issue at MS. I think the discussion mostly holds for the industry in general ignoring the MS specific parts of the post. The comment that responds to James' points completes the arguments and shows some positive trends that are encouraging.

I've brought up points like this at conferences and had the whole room go silent. It is a touchy issue for testers. Are we as valuable as developers to the dev process? Are agile methods a threat to testers?

One of the points in the comments states that devs and testers with equivalent skill level in their disciplines are now closer in pay.

"While one can say that 2 - 3 years ago the average level of a tester was about 2 levels lower than that of the average developer over the past 3 years we have seen the level of testers increase and the disparity in levels between developers and testers decrease."

This is an interesting point that doesn't often make it into the discussion. I know in my recent hiring, I've had a hard time finding testers that could do more than just run through test cases and file bugs. In any case, the trend is very positive.

I have the skills to be either a developer or a tester, so I've been asked why I am a tester. I like testing is the only answer I can give. However, on some teams, my "dev skills" were a threat somehow to the developers. I like to see the trend of testers with more of these skills. It makes for stronger teams.

"We are starting to see the 'self-fulfilling prophecy' of testing having lower prestige disappear. In many groups now testers are required to debug to line of code. In some groups testers are actually checking in bug fixes. In other groups testers are shipping automated tests on SDKs to customers."

With trends like this, I won't have to defend my debugging skills as much I hope.

It would be great to see more hard skill tracks like this at testing conferences if this really is the future.