Few months ago I faced a situation wherein my employer decided to stop having software testing job. Development teams were tasked to carry out QA /Testing activities along with development tasks. Only time would tell how successful or disastrous it turns out to be but my QA colleagues and I were faced with difficult times especially when many of us were in a foreign country. Test automation engineers were given the option to switch to development but I decided to not switch. I decided to continue with in the field of software testing which eventually resulted in me finding a new job. Here are my thoughts on what you can do if you also face this situation when your software testing job is killed -
- Knowledge transfer to development team. Devs are usually lazy when it comes to integration/system testing (If not then probably we would have never had software testing field) or they don’t have enough information about all the pieces of system put together. You would do great favour to them to share system and testing knowledge with them so that they can continue with testing in your absence.
- Look for short term testing opportunities within your current employer. Sounds contradictory when your employer does not want to have software tester at all? If you work in an MNCs then chances are that subject matter experts would be required by few teams. Soon after I was told that I should switch to development I was contacted by one team to help them on performance testing. They had been trying to hire performance testing expert but did not any have success. This was one opportunity I could not say No to. I had worked on performance testing in past but was far away from being a subject matter expert. In jumped in to new task, got to work on performance testing (exclusively) for six months. Lots of learning and interesting results. If I had said no to this opportunity then I would not have been able to learn about performance testing what I know today. If you want to know more about my performance testing learning then you can follow Performance Testing videos
- Don’t switch to another role for sake of it. Don’t take on development or any other role your heart is not ready to work with. Never let one company decide about the field you should work on. Follow your heart and work on what you want to work on. If you take up an unwanted role under pressure then you would end up doing shoddy job anyways. Would it be worth it?
- Last but not the least, gear up to find a new job. In fact be ready to find a new job any time in your career. There are no permanent jobs in IT industry but there are many companies on lookout for software tester. This is what I did and found a new job in the fields of software testing. I am not a developer and can not let someone else decide what I want to work on (full stop)
Have you ever faced such situation? What did you do? Or what would you do when you face such situation in future?