distributedlife

In my previous place of work there was a new tester and she was assigned a mentor who had 30 years of experience and for a few more days from the start of this post; he had more experience that I have been alive. But whenever I went past her desk, rather than showing her what we do when we test; he was pointing out the most intricate complexities of this legacy system, pointing out all the places that she would get caught up and tripped over and a vast wealth of knowledge that he had, and she needed to remember.

Naturally she didn’t appear to be enjoying herself.

So I went around to her desk one day to find out how she was going. I asked her: how are you going in testing, do you like it? hate it? are they aspects you like or interested in?

“I hate it” she said; “I hate it and I am going to leave.”

So I offered to talk to her about testing, what options I felt were available in the hope that we could find a new direction for her and a better suited mentor.

I showed her a diagram of each of the different disciplines I consider in software testing; it’s like this linked imaged and I asked her are you interested in being involved in the process of creating applications that help the user achieve their goals? Or are you interested in the performance or security aspects of a system? Perhaps your interested in the interactions between software components or the interaction between software and the hardware that it runs on? Or does considering the business implications of failing software or the implications of software failure on society as a whole? Or would you just like to focus your energy on just making sure the software works?

“I didn’t even know there were different specialisations in software testing. Nobody told me that.” She said. “And I’m interested in security testing.”

She was the first person in the organisation that had shown any interest in security testing.

And she wanted to quit because she didn’t even know it was an option.

And she wasn’t the first person I have met who had the same problem. So I undertook some research into how people view themselves in software testing and how they viewed their introduction into the profession. The results are linked here; but I’ll summarise the important parts below.

70% of software testers were unaware of the different specialisations that exist at the start of the their career. This is a lack of direction.

The majority of software testers surveyed felt they have insufficient information to achieve their career goals. This is an information deficit.

One in five testers who are leaving the profession are doing so because of this lack of information. This problem is retention.

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