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Should #TestersBhiCoders ? Which programming language they should begin with?

With the ongoing shift in the trends and the needs of IT industry, lot more is being expected from the testers. Tester is obviously expected to have the prime skills of finding defects (which is and should remain a passion always), but apart from that most of the recent job requirements have started to expect a lateral testing recruit to know two or more from the below list and the list keeps on growing.
  1. Automation tools like Selenium, Appium etc
  2. Programming in Java or Python, Ruby or CodedUI , Junit,
  3. RDBMS, SQL skills
  4. Cloud – AWS / Azure
  5. Performance testing tools – Jmeter or like

Please find below sample latest JD’s from one of the leading job portals in India

? One thing is sure, 2017 or beyond – today’s tester need to be a Super man/woman nothing less than that.

Another thing which is also in vogue is that many organizations are spending lot of money in getting their testing teams up-skilled on automation side.

Going by the current trends it is quite evident that even though we testers cannot be super humans and know everything on this earth, but knowing some automation tool is a must. It will not only come in handy but also help get us into a lucrative job or better still, help keep our job.

Our first take is that Testers should definitely move into coding sooner or later. #TesterBhiCoder is a trend that is more of a necessity in today’s changing world than anything else.

Recent post on Linkedin about the most popular tools hint a massive shift from legacy tools like QTP/UFT to new age open source tools like Selenium and Cucumber. Reference https://qarevolution.com/popular-testing-tools-2017/

https://agileblogs.agiletestingalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/2017-Testing-Tools.jpg

And recent updates on the most in demand programming languages is as below. Reference : https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/the-2017-top-programming-languages

Although Python is having the No. 1 slot, the top four—Python, CJava, and C++—all remain very close in popularity.

Let us correlate  the popular languages and the most popular automation tools

With 30% preference towards Selenium, 7% for Appium and 5% for Cucumber and 8% on Jenkins – that makes it close to 50% of tool set which are actually working together in some form or other in today’s agile and DevOps environment. All of these work well with Java.

I would like to thus recommend Java as the starting point for the testers and then pick up their choice of most popular testing tool

Agile Testing Alliance is also trying to get more and more testers learn Java under their #testerbhicoder initiative (https://www.townscript.com/e/java-boot-camp-for-testers)

Please check the following out  – Free Java Boot camp for testers from ATA. Instructor led online training program..

https://www.townscript.com/e/java-boot-camp-for-testers

 

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