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There’s a smart way to earn the highest reputation in industry, and that way is through becoming a quality assurance tester.Â
Today’s QA testing role offers an interesting roadmap that is easy, quick and smooth. A QA testing engineer can become: QA in DevOps, QA software development in test, and DevOps engineer.
This article shows how Quality Assurance specialists can move from QA tester role to DevOps and why this career shift can happen in an easy, quick and smooth manner.
Shifting from QA testing to DevOps is smart!
Are you wondering if it’s practical to shift from a QA testing role to DevOps? This section states 5 most compelling reasons why a career roadmap from QA to DevOps is the smartest way to earn more in the software development industry.Â
1. Software Testing is easy to learn.
Taking a start from software quality assurance is easier compared to commencing from software development.
When compared to software application development, software quality testing is far easier to learn. We say this because of the very nature of quality testing that, to a greater extent, requires the user’s perspective to verify functionality of the system. Starting with black box testing for example requires little or no command in the programming language.Â
Even in case of white box testing, where a QA tester is required to write code for analysis and verification software code quality, a QA tester can develop and perform quality test cases with just fundamental understanding of the subject software and coding.
In essence, the journey of a QA tester has taken an interesting turn in the modern day software development with approaches such as Agile and DevOps. Automation is at the core of Agile and Devops that uses Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery– CI/CD pipelines; an automated development workflow, to expedite the SDLC.
2. Getting a QA job is easy.
The local IT industry in Pakistan is growing in software development and software enabled services.
With 10,000 (registered) IT companies, the IT sector of Pakistan contributes 4.8% in the Gross Domestic Product- GDP, according to industry stats from the Pakistan Software Houses Association (P@SHA) and Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB) in its annual report Pakistan’s IT Industry Overview.
The IT export remittances also grew 137% in five years, between 2015 to 2020, reflecting an incredible year on year growth of 18%, cites PSEB.
Talk about software development specifically, with 3,166 total software houses as well as new IT enabled Services (ITeS) companies emerging on the canvas of Pakistan’s IT industry, the growth rate is consistent. This trend has especially risen because the startup culture in Pakistan is growing with neck breaking speed, shares PSEB in the report.Â
In a nutshell, whether its software development businesses or other ITeS providers, both bodies require Quality Assurance teams who can build seamless workflows to support the unprecedented growth. The only concern for you should be to think how to gain quality skills in software quality testing and mark your success as a software tester.
3. Free courses are available online.
You can learn software quality testing in just 2-months starting with free, self-paced digital courses available online such as introduction to software testing by Alison.com and Software Testing Tutorial at mygreatlearning.com.
Udemy also offers a free 1-month course on Software Testing at a slightly intermediate level to nurture software testing skills by covering advanced topics such as ‘Code Coverage’; taking beginners from user perspective to programming level testing, ‘Automation’; writing a program to auto generate powerful and logical test cases, and ‘Random Testing’; engineering a testing program that randomly checks for code section and bugs in them.
Using free online courses on the in demand Software Quality Testing skills, learners and developers can captivate recruiters for hiring.Â
Following the above, it’s safe to say that QA testing is easy to learn, but does the QA industry ensures job security?
Yes, QA testing has bright future prospects and ensures adequate job security. And here’s why we say this.
4. Automation testing is increasingly in demand.
DevOps practice is prevailing in the global software development industry. In 2017, DevOps market share was valued at over USD 2b which impressively swelled in 2021 reaching to over USD 7b. Analysts report that this boost is a result of the rapid software delivery and quality privileges provided by DevOps.Â
Another market research by Acumen Research and Consulting forecast a splendid growth rate of CAGR 20% that if truly met is to take DevOps market size to a ballooning figure of over USD 27b by 2030.
The above statistics imply a vast current and future demand for Automation testing, that is a skill to validate the CI/CD pipelines in the DevOps model of SDLC. Moreover, one finds tens of latest job posts on renowned portals such as LinkedIn, Glassdoor and Bayt.Â
5. Manual testing will last forever.
Even though the demand for automation testing skills is increasing in the agile and DevOps scenario, experts say that manual testing could never completely diminish from the landscape of quality testing.
The efficacy of manual testing in validating user experience makes it an indispensable choice for software testing. In paralell, automation hasn’t been able to simulate human intelligence to a level where the technology could accurately analyze user experience.
Moreover, an individual mastering in manual testing can correctly build automation test cases, since the working knowledge is essentially required for automation chops.
Following the above, manual testing is to remain forever, or at least in the long run, thwarting recruiters to ignore this core QA testing skill.Â
Learn more about the true potential of Manual and Automation testing in our dedicated blog.  Â
How to Shift from QA to DevOps- Your Career Roadmap
A smart way to adopt DevOps is the one where you slink the technical stuff at the beginning, holding onto a promising job role at the same time, and gradually taking guided steps to move to higher level. In other words, QA testing is easy to start at the beginner level, and offers quality testing professionals an impetus to advance towards high paying job roles without getting overwhelmed with too much technical stuff.
As a QA manual tester, one must take the following subsequent steps to shift to a DevOps role.Â
Step 1: Software QA Automation Engineer
First step for a beginner in quality testing is to learn and practice automation testing. Software automation testers are increasingly in demand ensued from the prevailing Agile and DevOps practice in software development life cycle. With a wealth of manual testing insights, QA testers can quickly learn automation testing and land on a high paying and more reputable job role.
The skill set of an Automation QA tester includes:
- Working knowledge of functional/non-functional testing
- Test design techniques
- Knowledge of Python or Javascript for writing automation tests
- Working knowledge of Agile (Scrum and Kanban)
- API automation testing
- Project management tools such as Jira and Trello etc.,
- SQL query writing and Shell Scripting
- CI/CD pipeline testing/Integration testing using Jenkins and/or Gitlab
- Security, accessibility and performance testing
After acquiring these skills, a software tester can aspire to work in Agile and DevOps software development companies who are increasingly seeking automation testing skills to leverage the efficiency privileges of modern software development methodologies.
Step 2: QA Software Developer in Test
Because software testers know the underlying structural content of a software, they could easily learn to fix a group of bugs themselves, thereby reducing the overhead in QA-development interaction.
Companies leverage this proximity between software testing and development by offering the job role of a ‘QA Software Developer in Test’. Testers at this job role manage testing and development in consecutive phases.
Given the bar of technical work at this role, QA specialists as developers increase their chances of: earning higher salary than a simple QA testers, and bring a bright chance to shift to a complete development role.
Another advantage for QA software developers in test is that they have the space to learn development in either waterfall, agile or DevOps SDLC. This is a plus for Automation QA job roles.
QA manual/automation testing and programming skills on high level languages are a must for this job role.
Step 3: DevOps Engineer
This is the final step in your journey to become a DevOps engineer. By this stage, an individual has 3 core skills of a DevOps engineer: quality testing skills, automation testing hands-on and programming language proficiency.
With little effort put in learning a minuscule number of further skills, a software quality testing specialist can adopt a fully enabled DevOps job role. Following is the list of top skills sought in DevOps specialists:
- Expertise in one of the high level programming languages; Java/C++ – Already Learnt in step 2Â
- Understanding of Unix/Linux or Windows OS.Â
- Knowledge and hand-on in prominent DevOps Tools: CI/CD tools (Jenkins, GitLab) – Already Learnt in step 1Â
- Configuration automation tools (Puppet, Chef, Ansible)
- Container run time (Docker, rkt, cri-o)
- Container orchestration tools (Kubernetics)Â
- Computer system architecture
- Database management – SQL/PSQL – Already Learnt in step 1Â
- Scripting language to automate cron jobs (Bash, Perl, Python) – Already Learnt in step 1Â
- Knowledge of any one cloud platform: AWS, Azure etc
Learn more about DevOps engineering role in our dedicated blog.
It’s an ideal time to learn QA testing!
With free courses offering certification, learning QA testing becomes easy. But a better path to learning QA testing is through a an in-person, virtual training that offers a more thorough, interactive and in-depth learning of QA testing.
‘Become an expert QA tester’ training at Dice Analytics coherently covers comprehensive contents in software testing, taking you through a smooth journey in the 2-months long course. The course content include:
Working knowledge:
- Software testing types and levels
- Test strategy and testing techniques
- Black box/white box testing
- Regression testing
- Traceability matrix flow
- API Testing
Tools:
- Jira/Kanban/Asana/Teamwork
- Azure DevOps
- Snagit, Spreadsheet, Template
- Javascript and PHP
- Postman
- Selenium webdriver (beginner level)
Visit our page Become an expert QA tester for a detailed course outline.Â
What’s the value for you?
Taking a software quality assurance course at Dice Analytics offers you the following key benefits:
Mentorship, career counseling and ISTQB official exam preparation guide is offered to learners alongside an industry recognized certificate of completion, on successful passing of the exam.
Through our digital portal, learners have the opportunity to study at their own schedule via recorded lectures, thereby offering the advantage of free re-enrollments in the subsequent batches.
