On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 01:23:20PM +0530, Kenneth Gonsalves wrote:
On Monday 31 May 2010 13:04:21 Nitesh Mistry wrote:
I keep reading a couple of ads in newspapers regarding 'Diploma in Software Testing'. Being a commerce graduate with fair amount of computer skills (that sounds too sujective) I want to know from the people in software industry following this list, whether it is worth pursuing it, and what are the future opportunities? What would be the scope of development after the initial employment at software tester? What kind of skills are involved in getting successful at this career? What might be the range of remuneration?
Thanks in advance for helping me make a career decision.
in the proprietary software world, there is a big demand for testers. This ranges from monkey-like input testing to using more advanced tools. Basically since the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing in that universe, the only way to get the software to work after a fashion is testing. Hence it is pretty remunerative (but soul deadening at the lower levels.) In the open source world, the ideal is to write your tests before writing the code and testing as you go along. Here one gets to see the whole body of code, and hence a 'tester' (who is usually a programmer also) gets to be productive in the sense that he can also find and fix bugs and graduate to full time programmer. Actually in the open source world, the line between testing and programming is very fine - practically non-existent. As Mark Pilgrim said - write your tests, write code till it passes the test and then stop writing code. There is a small parable I wrote which may be of interest in this respect:
http://lawgon.livejournal.com/79171.html
that said, if you can master something like selenium (an open source web testing tool) you will find a vast job market available for you, since even the proprietary guys will pay for good selenium hands. Selenium is developed by thougtworks in Bangalore, and if you go across there they would be quite happy to give you some training (or at least tips)
Thank you very much for your valued opinion.