In the corporate world, modern development is moving in a direction where Software testing is no longer becoming a necessity. I understand that testing is very important for any software but the strategy is slowly changing. In my company, there are still people doing software testing but mostly only in legacy products but modern products have a different testing approach.
There is a scrum team that consists of developers and each developer will be doing both developments as well as testing. This is the new approach. They may not be doing the testing on their code but instead, they would review someone else's code and might as well test that code. This way companies don't hire a Software Tester but instead, they hire a developer who can also do the testing job.
Community testers
Some of the community projects and open source projects depend on real users to test and give feedback. Mostly the developers do the initial round of testing and after that, the product does an alpha launch where the real users test the application and provide their feedback. Based on the feedback given, they then release the beta version that will have fewer errors. These version releases will always have a disclaimer saying they want to release it to the community directly for them to test and provide feedback.
Some companies also don't have testers in-house. They instead depend on testers from outside the organization. They hire contract testers and make them do some testing until the product is launched. There will be no continuous testing jobs for the testers. They mostly work short-term and help to release one particular version.
Starting the career as a Software tester
It is a debatable topic. Some people say that No SQL is going to be the future and some people argue saying that No SQL cannot solve all the problems and that is where SQL plays an important role and is required. So the same thing happens with software testing too. Many people argue saying that testing is very important in the software development lifecycle but some people say that testing will automatically happen or it should be a task done by the developer itself.
Starting a career as a software tester in today's world might expose someone to only limited opportunities. In my opinion, it can take several years to conclude that a software tester may not be a potential role for someone. But until then there will be a demand for this role somewhere. I would say that being a developer and having a specialization in testing is a high-rated skill because people can do both developments as well as testing whenever required.
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