How can we stay relevant in the software testing industry?

[Aditi Badola]

I feel networking and engaging with the community, keeping myself up-to-date with the recent developments in the industry. Does anyone else have any suggestions?

[Peter Van de Voorde]

Hi @Aditi Badola ,

First off: welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Great question and I believe you've already touched on some great points.

One more piece of advice I would give is: Give back to your community through content creation, be it articles, videos, blog posts, comments, speaking engagements, or something else.

This both helps you to stay up-to-date with recent trends and with being visible in your community. Both key aspects of staying relevant.

Just my 2 cents.

Cheers,
Peter

[Aditi Badola]

Thank you so much @Peter Van de Voorde I really consider content creation a great strategy to build your personal brand.    

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

I have a few experiences to talk about when we are looking at testing.  I will try to be brief though.

• Automate as much as you can, you want your humans looking for stuff that breaks for end-users, not checking that "handling a birthday on the 29th February works" each time (because it's never going to change)
• Embed your testers in the scrum or kanban team, and empower them to be able to say "nope, that doesn't work" and override your developer's opinion.  (Sorry devs, but if it doesn't work, it doesn't work)
• Get developers and product users to talk to testers.  
• Never "outsource" your testing.  Your testers need to be people who have a connection with the products in some way.  Ex-developers of it, current end users, anywhere in the middle.

The horror story I have on this is something I can expand on if anyone asks, but I'm hoping no-one does.

1. I wrote a system that moves money around in 1997.
2. In 2002, I was asked to re-write the money-moving bit to cope with some new stuff we hadn't anticipated in 1997, which was not too hard, all back-end changes
3. By 2002, the organisation had "outsourced" the testing team.  Don't.  Just don't do that.  Because we had to, we asked them to test my changes.  The brief was "end users should see no change", so "we don't need to do anything because nothing has changed"

If you run into this sort of tester, then run away.  They are utterly incompetent, and you can never trust them.

TLDR: whatever you do with testing, make sure you talk to testers who have a basic grasp of your systems.