I asked John Sonmez a question a few weeks ago, and he responded!!
For those of you who don’t know, John is the founder of Simple Programmer, a Pluralsight Author and Programmer, focused on making the complex simple. You can learn more on his about page.
I Highly recommend checking out his blog Simple Programmer also.
He reads the full email in the video, but I’ve posted the question here.
In my research I’ve found that Testers are normally less paid, & under appreciated compared to their developer counter parts. Do you have any suggesting for overcoming some of the stigma that QA’s might face?… P.S. Would consider test automation to be a decent niche for a personal brand?
You can checkout the full video below.
Here are some takeaways
- It’s easier to manually test code then to develop it (No offense to manual testers).
- Automation is one of the most valuable and highly demanding skill sets.
- The Automation Engineer role is a higher position then just a QA or Dev because you have to be good at both.
- You can start an entire business around automation.
Once you’re at the skill level need to build Automation Framework you are a developer. You’ve just focused on some different skills similar to someone being a Front-End Dev, Backed-End, or A Mobile Developer would.
Overcoming the “QA stigma” is just mindset shift.
3 responses to “Cure For Testers Guilt Via John Sonmez”
[…] This is something I’ve been dealing with for a while now. Asked someone about it and got a great answer here […]
Completely disagree with the statement that testing code is much easier than developing it.
Testing is much harder. You have more variety of options to choose from during a test design. When coding, one just implement a logic from already defined scope.
You can still argue that ‘junior tester’ might not know how to test properly because of lack of experience, but this is the same as you put on ‘junior programmer’ who is writing code in trial and error hoping that it will magically come together.
If we’re basing difficulty on the number of possible implementation I can understand what you’re saying. It depends on how much definition either group has ahead of time. Some testers might be given a very detailed test plan from a lead, for example. Definitely an interesting way of looking at it that I didn’t think about.