Michele Martone

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A few years back I got a question from a tester who is the only tester in their organization and also wanted to grow their career within that company. They had challenges pretty typical of testers, not much mentorship, no consistent way to measure their contributions, and no specified career path.

This is my response which I am posting because it could be relevant to others.

These challenges seem to be fairly common for a Software Testing role. For Software Engineers, the career path is usually pretty well defined, but not for more specialized roles like ours. A hard truth (anecdotal based upon my experience) is that it seems difficult to get into those Director type positions with just a testing background. They exist, but are not as plentiful as Software Engineering Directors. I don’t mean to discourage, but this is a harder field for this type of career growth. But if you love it, keep at it! If not, maybe consider picking up more SE skills too.

I have a bunch of thoughts for testing, they may be more of a brain dump, but I hope they help.

• Make sure you understand why you want to progress and in which direction. A manager vs an IC would have a different progression. Maybe your motivation is more influence, so either path would work, vs you really love helping people, so a manager path seems more rewarding.

• In your current role, you could work on the influence part of the position:

  • It would demonstrate lead/manager skills if you started a testing group and recruited testing sympathetic engineers and even product managers to the group. Using your application and code as the basis, present existing or new test code, do proof of concepts, talk about testing approaches, etc. within this group.
  • Take some junior engineers under your guidance to learn the testing part of the job. Even if it’s unit testing, this would take some burden off of their manager.

• Think of any project that would make it even easier to test. I’m thinking if people are avoiding any level of tests because of some reason, that’s the thing to fix.

Similarly:

• Take it upon yourself to take a poll of the engineers to find out their biggest testing pain points, and then start a project to fix it. This shows lead ability.

• Think about branching into other quality influencing measures. Do you have static analysis of your code everywhere? Do you have smoke tests? Is there appropriate monitoring over your product, or can you set up monitoring and alerting? Do you have SLOs? Do you have pretty dashboards or a status page, maybe for your builds, or your services, third party dependencies, etc. This is more technical in nature, but would also increase your influence. Note, most of this is basically SRE work so may not be a great idea so weigh this carefully. But some of this, if successful, may get other engineers attention, and then you can teach them how to do this work too (like do one SLO and then teach other engineers what that means so they do the next).