Career Tendencies in a QA Field

If you are reading this article, then you are probably working in a software testing field or are interested in it.

Or if you are searching for a job, you may find the tips described in this article really useful.

By the way, all numbers and analytical samples are taken from https://www.practitest.com/, whose employees have conducted these polls.

So how does one get a position of a QA engineer? Each case is unique:

• About 18 % of QA engineers wished to become QA engineers and studied major studies while searching for a job. About 24 % of the respondents said that they became testers accidentally (there was no job in the team they sent their CVs to and so on);
• 65 % of the interviewees stated that they acquired the required skills during their work. About 58 % of them studied professional literature, 44 % — visited specialized courses and received the corresponding certificates of compliance;
• 75 % of the pollees think that communication skills are crucial for QA engineers, 63 % of them believe that only the skill of creating flexible test cases and automated tests is a key to success.

Today’s tendencies of software bugs

The bugs found in production are the nightmare of every developer and this makes a QA engineer the best friend of a developer.

Testers have a difficult task to perform testing and retesting of the fixed functionality in order to find software bugs and this greatly saves the developer’s precious time.

Today’s tendencies of software bugs show a high need for finding defects at primary stages to prevent production from error’s appearance.

A few numbers:

1. 79 % of the respondents consider bug reports the most important test documentation;
2.  About 76 % of QA specialists use various bug tracking systems (such as Redmine, Jira, etc.), so they are the most popular tools to manage tests;
3.  About 60 % of all errors are found in production and are connected with the delivery of non-checked or broken software code. Then there go defects connected with using of broken databases.

Other software testing tendencies

There are no clear borders where software test development ends and testing starts.

If you have reached the desired goals in your career thanks to your work and perseverance, then you are the lucky one.

You can compare the global tendencies of a QA field with the processes, established in your company, firm, or organization.

• At the beginning of the year 2020, about 36 % of the interviewed testers needed to report to project managers, and 48 % of them — in 2018;
• 73 % of the interviewed QA engineers said that they have studied the development basics on their own and about 55 % — visited specialized courses and online lessons;
• According to the poll, conducted by https://www.qualitestgroup.com, Ireland has the highest rate of testers per capita — 62 people per 100,000 citizens. Then there goes the USA, and the third one is Israel.