Recession-ary Testing

As we all know, the world has entered a particularly challenging time with a continuous stream of daily news on the recession, cutbacks and the credit crunch – what does this mean for Software Testers? How secure are our jobs? What effect will it have on testing as a function? I don’t have a crystal ball but I have read some interesting articles over the past few weeks and have come up with a new term – Recessionary Testing!

The Learning and Skills Council in the UK issued a 10 credit-crunch proof jobs list at the beginning of the year and Software Testing sat comfortably towards the top of the list along with Web Designers, IT Security Professionals & Viral Marketing Professionals. I found this interesting and wondered how they could formulate such a list, on what basis is testing more secure than any other profession?

Testing as a profession has grown enormously over the last decade to a point where the importance of software testing within any IT project cannot be underestimated. At EuroSTAR 2009 – attendees spoke about the future of Software Testing and during Manifesto workshops, came up with some intriguing ideas – Testing will be a university degree, we will survive every economic crisis, now and in the future and importantly, what I want to discuss – We will be Pro-Active, not Re-Active! You can view the manifesto online at http://www.softwaretestingmanifesto.org/

A Pro-Active tester can be relied upon and viewed as a real asset to a project in the current climate – software releases while always important are even more so nowadays as delays, bugs or any user issue will severely damage a company’s reputation. High standards of testing must be applied across the board to ensure that users engage with a highly polished product.

So what can testers do?

Innovate, not stagnate – get involved, interact, add value and continuously strive to improve. Get online, begin to read some test specific blogs, maybe start your own J join a local testing group (there’s lots) contribute in forums, share and receive advice and get informed as ‘Knowledge is Power’ (forgive the cliché) don’t hide away or muddle along, engage with one another and the benefits will be far-reaching.

Recessionary Testing is all about growing the profession and not letting the recession push us backwards – nobody is quiet sure when everything will look rosy again, least of all, our so-called economic experts but we can be Pro-Active and emerge stronger than ever..