State of Testing 2017 Report

You did participate in the 2017 state of testing survey, didn’t you? Well, even if you did not, the report has been released last week. The guys over at PractiTest did a great job again and it is even better to hear that the number of participants has risen again to over 1600, so there is quite some significance to the results in my opinion. So be sure to get the report here.

I’d like to comment on two chapters quickly.

The size of the testing team

14% of the participants stated that they are working in teams with more than 50 testers. Leaving test factory environments aside, this still smells a bit in my opinion. Is this really the size of the team they are doing the daily work or is this the size of all testers on all teams? Like  a community of testing or matrix organization if you want. There might be situations where the testing team is over 50 people but you are assigned to a single scrum team, so your working team is way smaller. So maybe this would be something worth investigating furthermore in future surveys.

Job Stability

The risen concern about job stability was a bit of a surprise for me as I thought we were beyond the peak of fearing that testing would be lost when going agile. So the real question for me is (given that the majority of participants labeled themselves as testers or test managers in oposition to automation testers) if people are afraid of a changed tester role or losing their jobs altogether? If it is the latter, is it about testing jobs in general or rather in their specific companies? I for myself am pretty sure that my testing role in 5 years will have changed, but that is not a reason of concern to me, quite the opposite actually.

Anyway, thank you for participating and enjoy the report!