Software Test Engineer is inferior or a gold hard to find-please see Microsoft View software Test

　　
Recently saw some articles reported, software Test engineer that very high salary, very high treatment, but many people still not past that kind of psychological obstacle. Everyone thinks that software test engineers are doing chores for programmers and even being driven to clean up the mess ...
Is the software Test engineer really inferior? In terms of salary, many big companies have opened big prices to recruit test engineers, which should change the status quo, but many companies complain that they can't find anyone.
Please see the Microsoft Engineer's point of view.
(1) Francis: Excellent software companies will ensure that the Test team's human resources and level
Francis Zhou graduated from the University of California system Santa Cruz. He joined Microsoft in 2000 and worked as a software development test engineer and test leader at Headquarters, and participated in the development of Windows XP and Windows Presentation Foundation. At the beginning of 2005, he formally joined the Microsoft Asia Engineering Institute and participated in the development and testing of TTS, Microsoft Speech Server, ActiveSync, Gamesux and other projects. He is currently a Test manager who is in charge of test development for gaming platforms and mobile platform multimedia software.
I will be from a professional software management staff's perspective to analyze whether the tester is "a gold difficult to ask."
According to the Microsoft China Research and Development Group recruitment data, our annual demand for Software Test engineers (SDET) and Software Development Engineers (SDE) of the number of basic equal, but Sdet is always in short supply. The reason for this is that the industry's bias against the test work led to the development of software engineers to avoid testing, but the biggest reason is because the market is lack of good testing and development capacity of engineers. The combination of two reasons leads to a severe shortage of qualified software development testers.
A good test engineer needs to consider the problem from many different angles, and to have the ability to have in-depth investigation and research problems while covering the widest extent possible. and its ability to investigate problems is no less than that of software developers. It can be said that a sdet is more likely to contribute to the product than the SDE of its technical level, thus helping him to develop more rapidly in his career.
Just as developers have different levels, there is a big difference between testers. Testers who design test plans, develop test automation software, debug, and investigate questions are invaluable and often difficult to replace. Imperfect test teams can affect product quality and its development process, resulting in product failure to be released on schedule or with serious defects. Therefore, the excellent software enterprise managers will ensure that the Test team human resources and level. According to the above facts, whether the tester is "handyman" or "a gold difficult to ask" is not difficult to judge.
(2) Liu Yan: Environmental causes testers Inferior this view
Liu Yan, Software test development engineer, Microsoft Asia Engineering Institute test Group, three years of software testing experience, is engaged in the Microsoft adcenter related project testing work
This is a topic that is often talked about. In the end testers are for the programmer or a gold difficult to find the domestic software industry special talent.
Personally, the test engineer is a professional technology and their own quality has a certain requirements of the occupation. A good software Testing engineer is a gold hard to find anywhere. With my Microsoft Asia Engineering Institute As an example, our test engineers need to work with development engineers, discipline managers, from product definition (products definition) to product development (products development) to product maintenance Servicing), throughout the product lifecycle, continuously contribute to a variety of recommendations, test documents and test data. In such a development team, the status of the test engineer is the same as that of the development engineer and the discipline Manager-an integral part of the software development team.
The same importance as test engineers and development engineers makes the hiring criteria for software Test development Engineers (SDET) and development engineers basically similar, but because of the long-standing "inequality" perspective, many software developers have been chosen: Most people are more willing to be software development engineers. This also appears the so-called software Test engineer "one gold difficult to ask" phenomenon.
But at the same time, as an excellent test engineer, he should have the knowledge and skills of software development similar to that of development engineers, be knowledgeable about the SOFTWARE product architecture and technology being tested, and have enough enthusiasm and motivation to find and point out vulnerabilities in the product with accumulated testing experience. If these are just a brief description of the job requirements of the test engineer, we can see that such an engineer who can help the product development team find important flaws will always be a gold-hard one.
For testers, inferior, I think it's caused by the environment. At Microsoft, we create the same important environment for testing and development. A Software Test development engineer (SDET) typically works with development engineers to develop automated test tools and test cases for the corresponding product modules. Of course, it must be admitted that Microsoft also has a number of projects that require testers with simple skills to help run manual tests. For these testers, I do not think it is "inferior", but the test industry's "primary work." Just as junior developers are only responsible for writing simple logic modules, the simple work of test engineers should not be criticized or belittled. At the same time, as long as these testers are willing, they can fully grow in their work, and eventually become a good experienced tester.
(3) Li Haiheng: The scope of software testing coverage is much larger than the industry generally see the part
Li Haiheng, Microsoft Asia Engineering Institute software Test Development engineer, has been engaged in testing for more than three years, has participated in video coding, online conferencing and enterprise-class instant communication products such as testing, and hosted the Web application Test architecture development. Technical interest for generic programming, architecture design, test automation.
At present, the domestic difficult to see the advanced testing skills to make the industry underestimate the tester's career development space, and then come to the conclusion. In fact, software testing needs to be covered much more than is currently widely seen in the industry, so testers often do not have the opportunity to show or develop the corresponding advanced test skills. In general, software testing should include testing in addition to verifying that the software behavior conforms to the product design.
1. Design phase
1.1. Product design (feature specification) itself to meet customer needs, whether it is easy to be used by users who are not proficient in the computer
1.2. Whether the architecture design (designing specification) conforms to the product design, whether it is easy to lead to defects, whether it is easy to lead to poor performance and instability, and whether it is beneficial to test
1.3. Whether the test plan is fully functional, whether appropriate methods are used to test each of the different areas, whether time and manpower is adequate, and whether the measures to help the developer improve quality are appropriate and adequate, and whether the quality of the test tools is ensured
2. Implementation phase
2.1. Whether a code update caused serious defects can not be tested
2.2. Whether a developer has introduced too many flaws
3. Stabilization phase
3.1. Whether the defect is worth repairing
3.2. Defective repair sequence is reasonable
3.3. Defect repair will cause more defects
4. Release phase
4.1. Whether the number of defects is a trend of enlargement
4.2. Whether the release version meets the release criteria
Thus, in order to accomplish these tasks, testers should have the skills to include
1. Understand the customer needs (for 1.1), understand the industry technology status (for 1.2)
2. Programming and architecture design capabilities, debugging capabilities (for 1.2,1.3,2.1,3.1,3.3)
3. Understand the product related technology, understand the product itself (for 1.1,3.2,3.3,4.1)
4. Understand the workflow of the developer (for 2.1,2.2,3.2,4.2)
5. Understand Product code structure (for 1.2,1.3,2.1,3.1,3.3)
6. Part of project management capacity (for 1.3,2.1,2.2,3.1,4.1,4.2)
It is not difficult to find that a tester with these capabilities, developers are more than enough, career development of the road and developers are not much different.
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