If you’re looking for a path to develop in the software testing world, or even trying to break into the industry for the first time, you might be wondering what the most in-demand testing skills are right now. If so, you’re in the right place!
Here’s what testing skills employers are looking for in 2022
- Testing automation – manual testing is becoming more and more obsolete, and many employers are looking for engineers who are proficient in testing automation tools like Selenium, Playwright, Appium, and other automation systems.
- Agile and DevOps methodologies – these days, most software development companies are agile, so you need to understand how to work within the agile project management system. Estimating tasks, sticking to sprint goals, and staying open to communicating will help you derive more results in the long run.
- In-depth programming skills – it’s not enough just to know how to write plain 'asserts', you know. It's often necessary to understand what actually happens under the hood of the code being written. Programming expertise is vital when you get flaky tests or unstable code behavior. The other win-win situation is when you need to integrate your favorite stack with some open-source product, like the OzonTech folks did for Allure Report.
- CI/CD and Ops tooling and practices – there are many QA tasks at the intersection of infrastructure and development with which you can gain new experience: maintaining releases, setting up technical stuff, updating test data, etc. That being said, you'd better know how to use the whole dev team's infrastructure to provide stable, frequent, and automated test suites' execution across the pipeline.
- Mastery of test management tools – while it's definitely a skill that comes with experience, the engineer should be familiar with at least a couple of test management and reporting tools. The reason behind that idea is that it’s not enough just to know how to write&run tests – you need to know how to interpret and share the results. An amazing set of tools to know would be TestRail or PractiTest as manual focused systems and Allure TestOps as an automation-first testing hub.
Conclusion
As always, there’s a lot more to being a testing engineer than having just one skill set. You need to know how to write tests, but you also need to be able to interpret results and pass information on to developers working on the project.
Most companies are looking for team players, who understand what the project lifecycle is, and how they fit into the process. So if you really want to broaden your appeal to employers, you need to broaden your skill set to include things that might not seem at first glance to be testing skills. If you can combine technical skill with management and operations ability, then you might just be the perfect testing engineer package in 2022.
Learn more about Allure tools
Qameta Software focuses on developing amazing tools that help software testers. Learn more about Allure Report, a lightweight automation reporting tool, and Allure TestOps, the all-in-one DevOps-ready testing platform.
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