Testers’ ideas flow of the week: books, shift left testing, and incompetent engineering teams

Every week, we collect the most active discussions in different communities about everything connected to software testing. 

So you don’t need to subscribe to dozens of groups and channels – everything the most important is here. Follow the Software Testing Talks Facebook group and r/softwaretestingtalks Reddit community to get our weekly discussions lists directly to your feed.

Briefly, here is what folks were talking about during the last week:

💡 Should developers write their own stories instead of Product Manager/Owners?

💡 What books can you recommend about software testing and agile development + testing

💡 Is the QA engineer role (Selenium) dying? Will there still be roles available in a few months?

💡 Is QA for anyone?

💡 Got 1 star from an app user because my app was made for kids and the user is not a kid 🤦‍♂️

💡 Why aren’t more QAs implementing shift left testing?

💡 A lot of people stress about getting a job… but don’t you guys stress about the possibility of not being able to do the job after being hired?

💡 Is there any situation where discovering something wouldn’t lead to either adding an automated regression test or removing the problematic code?

💡 Is testing hard?

💡 Can be working on a moderately incompetent software engineering team be useful?

💡 Recruiters/hiring managers – would you be more likely to give a tester a chance in an AI role if they had an AI Testing Certification?

Let’s dive deeper into the most interesting opinions.

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Should developers write their own stories instead of Product Manager/Owners?

What are your thoughts on this ?

My thoughts – Maybe its okay for stories which are “too technical” for PO to understand, especially non-technical PO’s.

>> check the discussion in a oneofthethree Slack community.

My favorite answer:

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What books can you recommend about software testing and agile development + testing?

> check the discussion in a r/softwaretesting Reddit community.

Here is the list of books recommended by the community:

👉  Lessons Learned in Software Testing: A Context-Driven Approach

👉  Agile Testing and More Agile Testing from Lisa Crispin & Janet Gregory

👉  Leading Quality: How Great Leaders Deliver High Quality Software

👉  BDD in Action

👉  The A Word by Alan Page

👉  Perfect Software: And Other Illusions about Testing by Gerald M. Weinberg

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Is the QA engineer role (Selenium) dying? Will there still be roles available in a few months?

I’m planning on entering the job market in a few months, in January or February. I had someone tell me that QA will die by January and it will be more of a full-stack role that requires testing. Now I’m worried. Should I be?

>> check the discussion in a r/softwaretesting Reddit community.

My favorite answer:

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Is QA for anyone?

I found this woman on IG claiming shes able to make a QA out of anyone… is this legit?? Or a total scam? https://instagram.com/iamjennifergaddis?utm_medium=copy_link

>> check the discussion in a r/QualityAssurance Reddit community.

My favorite answer:

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The next one made me laugh:

Got 1 star from an app user because my app was made for kids and the user is not a kid 🤦‍♂️

> check the discussion in a r/androiddev Reddit community.

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Why aren’t more QAs implementing shift-left testing?

Currently working with architecture team at my organization for transforming our test culture towards shift left. After lots of studying and reading the philosophy of shift left, I’m blown away at how few resources are out there that talk about the concepts. I’m seeing a QA trend moving this direction in the coming years. 99% of QAs I’ve interviewed are just “selenium testers” that know a single test library for front end or back end testing end to end. I feel like these types of jobs will be insolvent in the next 5-10 years and the skill set will shift to basically only SDET level testers who can write low level tests alongside developers.

Also having savvy devops knowledge will make or break most automation engineers job prospects, as shift left needs QA to get deeply involved with dev ops know-how in order to work.

Thoughts?

When I say shift left, I mean:

Release to production quickly in small increments

Test everything in isolation. This means 90% of your tests are ran before the code is even deployed into any environment.

Heavy investment in unit testing for single-class & multiple classes together

Hardly any e2e tests are written.

Mock external dependencies via dependency injection.

Implement contract testing to guarantee integration points between components.

Does anybody see this “shift” coming to the QA job market? I don’t think I’ll ever hire a strict end-to-end automation engineer ever again after realizing the implications of where the markets moving.

Prove me wrong.

>> check the discussion in a r/QualityAssurance Reddit community.

My favorite answer:

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A lot of people stress about getting a job… but don’t you guys stress about the possibility of not being able to do the job after being hired?

I feel like I’m more stressed about the latter than the former

>> check the discussion in a r/QualityAssurance Reddit community.

My favorite answer:

Let’s take a look at some great insights from software testing influencers.

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> Check discussion under the post here.

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>> Check discussion under the post here.

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

>> Check discussion under the post here.

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

>> Check discussion under the post here.

So now you know what was going on in the software testing community last week. Follow the Software Testers Ideas Flow group on FB and r/softwaretestingtalks on Reddit to get testers’ ideas flow of every week directly to your feed.

Feel free to contact me on Linkedin if you have any suggestions or ideas about Testers’ Ideas Flow blogs. I am always happy to connect with testers and get even more discussions to my feed 🙂