Changes in Quality

After seventeen plus years in the tech business I've learned that if you're not adapting to change you're going to be left behind. I can recall no other time in my time recruiting career where this is true then the shift from manual to automated testing.

The speed at which development leaders have moved quality control strategy was staggering. Demand for manual QA dropped to nearly zero while countless "Software Engineer Development in Test" (SDET) jobs are going unfilled.

The catalyst for this change is clear - manual testing was slowing the process down. As engineers are prone to do, someone in a development shop somewhere wrote a program to perform QA functions. Then someone else made that program better. Before you know it Selenium, Cucumber, JMeter, and a slew of other Quality / DevOps tools were born.

If you like be involved in the entire lifecycle, working with business and technical teams to automate processes that facilitate speed in software delivery there is plenty of opportunity in the marketplace.

If your career has largely revolved around manually testing software, take heart. The skills & passion you have translate to other roles within the development lifecycle such as Business Analysis, Project Management, Product Ownership, and Customer Support & Training.

Technology moves pretty fast, if you don't stop and look around once in a while you're going to miss it. -Ferris Bueller