I chose the red pill
After getting involved in the real world of software development, there is no way back
I love to work with software development, and every day that I learn a new piece of this big puzzle I love it even more.
Twelve years ago I started working with software development, and approximately 6 years ago I got more involved with the whole process of developing software (because in the beginning, in the first 6 years, I was just doing manual testing).
After doing manual testing for so long time I got upset, and then I decided that I would need to learn about software test automation, to be able to focus on more important tasks than the very repetitive ones.
Going further, I decided that more than just doing software test automation I would also need to learn about continuous integration, back end, front end, infrastructure, and so on.
I still have a lot to learn, but I always challenge myself to get out of my comfort zone and learn something new. And it is always fun!
One thing that is worth mentioning is that as much as I learn about software architecture, the more I want to learn. And as much as I know the whole picture, more I can help on ensuring that things will be done with quality in mind.
Yesterday I watched a talk by a friend, Leonardo Galani, that called: “Tester, get your stuff. You’re fired”, and then it inspired me even more to write this post, that I was already planning.
In this talk, Galani explained many important things that people need to know if they want to work with software testing (or software quality). Some of these things are about: what is a framework, what’s the difference between a web server and an application server; what’s the difference between backend and front end; what is a middleware; understanding application logs; using bash, regular expressions, the importance of pair programming and code review, etc.
And all of this is exactly what I believe too, and as professionals, even being specialists in software testing, we need to understand the whole picture, we need to know how to communicate with other software engineers, and we need to understand that staying in our comfort zone is something that is not acceptable anymore. It is anti-ethical.
So, the final message I would like to leave is that the world is changing a lot when talking about software development, including software testing/quality, and this means that we need to be prepared for this new way of working, or we will be out of this game.
Here are some suggestions for you to start learning a bit about some of the things that are so required these days, even for testers:
http://codecademy.com/ → free platform for learning programming in a very diverse way (front end, back end, command line, version control, etc)
http://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780321601919/samplepages/0321601912.pdf → Chapter 5 of Continuous Delivery book, by Jez Humble and Dave Farley. It talks about the anatomy of the deployment pipeline
https://www.go.cd/help/ → gocd get started — To start implementing CI/CD for real
https://learn.hashicorp.com/terraform → Terraform get started — to create infrastructure as code
https://spacelift.io/blog/how-to-install-terraform → How to Download & Install Terraform on Windows, Linux, Mac
https://www.amazon.com/Clean-Code-Handbook-Software-Craftsmanship/dp/0132350882 → Clean Code book, by Robert C. Martin
https://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Programming-Explained-Embrace-Change/dp/0321278658 → Extreme Programming book, by Kent Beck
http://leanpub.com/end-to-end-testing-with-protractor → End to end testing with Protractor — Lessons learned about e2e test automation, my new book!
I hope this post has opened your eyes at least for a bit and has helped you!
If you liked it, share it with your friends, or leave a comment.
Bye!
