Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

See a lot of people explain why companies are recruiting test developers, talking about efficiency, talking about job responsibilities, no one is talking about the changes in the development of the industry.

Before I start the text, I would like to make a point that 80% of those who do tests are not called test engineers.

OK, with this point of view, let's talk about the current development of the industry. If you have not entered the industry, then some concepts may not quite understand, it does not matter, contact first.

As key roles in DevOps, future software test engineers and quality personnel must have certain development and operation and maintenance capabilities at the same time.

Testers will be more deeply involved in the development work, through "test left shift", work with developers to develop test plans in advance, promote code review, code audit, unit testing, automated smoke testing, test precision analysis and R & D self-testing to ensure the quality of the R & D phase.

In addition, testers will also participate in configuration deployment, configure automated test cases into the continuous delivery chain, and monitor the application quality after release through the "test shift to the right".

The "test left shift" I am talking about here refers to the quality assurance in the R & D phase, and "test shift to the right" means quality control after release. If you understand this concept, you can clearly understand what test development is referring to.

If you are a tester, you think your company is not big, these things do not involve me, I do not care. So, I have already said what test development is above, there is no need to look down below, you choose to sit back and watch the sky, no one can stop it.

Next, I will talk about the current situation of the whole testing industry as a whole.

I am not alone in these situations, but are recognized by private exchanges with test managers in Ali, 360 and other industries.

The first point of view: the popularity of the iterative methodology of project management of XP, Scrum and CI/CD/DevOps increases the testing pressure.

If you are new to the industry, you may think that testing is about looking for bug, but the core of a test engineer is quality assurance. For example, in the past, a project was released monthly, one in two months and one in January. Now, a month has gradually become two weeks, three weeks, or even a week, or even two days. If it is at this pace, R & D only needs to change one line of code, you have to ensure the correctness of this line of code, you have to write a lot of use cases, and even return to it. Dozens or even hundreds of them are possible. Well, his changes will become more and more frequent, and for the test, every change, we have to do regression, and this kind of return, in this short-time iteration is getting shorter and shorter rhythm, in fact, there is no way to rely on manpower to support, at that time, it will inevitably bring test engineers to work overtime, and overtime work alone can not solve the problem, so at this time, the pressure of testing is very great.

The second point of view is that the original quality assurance system lacks engineering technical support that can be integrated into the architecture.

What does the original quality assurance system refer to? we are talking about the earliest manual testing methodology, what boundary value, and some of our simplest automated testing and stress testing. In fact, all the original testing system has gradually become inapplicable in today's testing industry, especially in the stage of the rapid development of the Internet. Although it is still very useful at present, such a system is difficult to integrate into such a popular environment such as continuous delivery, continuous integration, DevOps and so on. You do automated testing, how to integrate into this system, how to quickly find online problems, as well as earlier detection of R & D-level problems, rely on the original quality assurance means, in fact, is a bit scarce.

The third point of view: a large number of test engineers with weak technical foundation in the industry face elimination and outsourcing.

This sentence sounds cruel, but you have to see the change. By communicating with some test managers, they all think that many test engineers have failed, either a little bit or a little bit of automation. 20% and 30% of people understand the most basic automation, and the ability of automation also belongs to a very weak link, which can not solve the deep-seated problems in the company, and there is no way to help the company support and build a higher platform. improve a better set of testing processes, so it will also cause this category of people to fail.

For example, some of Ali's current situation is to recruit test development, or recruit R & D to do testing. Test development and R & D are responsible for completing the construction of the company's quality system, continuous integration, continuous delivery, DevOps, and some quality monitoring platforms, and the rest are outsourced to other companies. This is their current situation, that is to say, if you are just dots. Then you will soon lose your job opportunity in a big company and will be directly absorbed by the outsourcing company.

So, that's why a lot of companies recruit test developers.

Speaking of which, there must be a lot of people who will be a little bit, complaining about why they recruit ordinary tests, automate and know the basics of the language. If you can understand the development of the previous industry, then you can also understand that they have higher expectations for testing, and the existing tests can not be solved, so they can only reflect this in recruitment.

-add a split line here-

Let's extend it a little bit more.

Where did the concept of test development engineer come from?

At first, this term is not called test development, but a test engineer who understands technology and research and development. later, the word is very long, coupled with the fact that test development used to have a corresponding word in the old era. From the time of Microsoft, Microsoft called engineers on testing, a development engineer in the testing field. Later, the word was gradually adopted by many companies, and then the word test development gradually became popular.

How many languages does a test engineer need to know?

2 doors. The first door, we recommend the use of Python. Python is the preferred language for automation, so Python comes first.

In the second language, when you earn more than 20,000 yuan or more a month, it will be very difficult to have more influence just by doing tests. What do you need to do at this time? First, from the perspective of research and development, to influence the R & D team to improve quality, and second, from the point of view of operation and maintenance and online users, to influence operation and maintenance and online users, and then to analyze better quality.

If you want to do these two things, only rely on Python, it is somewhat weak, for example, the whole company is using Java,go, you use Python docking will be very troublesome, for example, you have to analyze the specification of their code, memory leaks in the code, multi-performance deadlocks, all aspects of problems, you have to invent tools to find these problems, the technology stack is different, it will be very troublesome. So Python is your first language. After Python, you can go in two directions, one is Java, the other is go. Knowing 2 languages is enough. Of course, like the front end, html,js,css, this must be everyone needs to understand, these are basically basic knowledge.

Is there no difference between test development and development?

Testing is actually better than development, but because of the status quo, we are embarrassed to talk about it. The requirement for the ability of testing is even higher than that of development, but it is just that in the current testing industry, a large number of people have not grown up, causing people to think that development is better than testing.

For example, what does the development engineer do every day? learn website development, database query, and various tools. every day's work is for the product manager to tell you that I want to add a favorable comment on the page, how many people like it, and you give me this function. The developer will go to the background, the first, add a field to the database, the second, add a query to the code, and the third, on the web side. Add a display effect. Every day, every year, year round is doing such a thing, you can think that is the addition, deletion, modification and query of the database, coupled with the display of web pages, most developers are like this, and only a few developers will come out. For example, go into a stronger architectural layer to think about solutions. Most research and development is also perplexed by the daily moving of bricks.

What does the test do? First of all, manual testing needs to be done, the second is automated testing to be done, and the third, special testing should also be done. What's next? when the test moves to the left, some problems in R & D quality should be found in advance. At the same time, the quality of the products after launch should be monitored, some online users' crashes should be found, and all business scenarios should be understood. So in the overall scope, testing is more promising than research and development. In terms of technical capability, testing is also required to have something that R & D does not know.

For example, how to measure power consumption, how to measure memory leaks, some of the underlying performance, how to test, these things R & D is out of touch with, on the contrary, we often need to pay attention to these indicators. Testing is a more valuable position than R & D, but unfortunately, we. Basically, all the tests in the industry are busy, neglecting the construction of the quality system and the testing process.

Later, you will gradually find that with the popularity of devops and continuous delivery of this set of things, testing, operation and maintenance will slowly control the quality of the entire company, and then R & D will only be responsible for writing code. At present and in the past years, R & D has an advantage over testing, that is, because of high-level quality assurance, the testing industry basically does nothing. What everyone does is low-end, little by little, or low-end automation. Then very few people go up, and if you come up, you will find that testing is more valuable than development. But both have the same goal, both are development engineers, but one focuses on testing and the other focuses on function. So now many companies, especially large companies, recruit test development and R & D to do testing, and then click and outsource.

All right, gossiping so much, in the future, I will start to talk about what the resume of test development is like, follow me, benefit you.

I'm Lao Bai. I've come in vain.

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