The Multiverse of Testing

The secret of succeeding in modern-day testing (SDET) role.

Evolution of testing role a.k.a the past and the present trend of QE role!

The ‘test engineering’ role is one of the tech roles that has evolved a lot over the last decade. The growing competition across the industry, exponentially increasing user base, the number of choices & alternatives available to the user and some incredible innovations are some factors which have made consumers more aware and spoiled for choice!

This has led to an era where product quality is now seen as the foremost decisive factor for any product’s success. The quality covers usability, learnability, stability, and availability followed by a long list of these -ilities. All the above changes have brought a shift in the prioritisation strategy of leadership teams to focus on quality & focus on hiring well for quality engineering teams.

With the increase of software product & design complexities and end-user journeys , testing has become a core part of all SDLC phases irrespective of the development model being used. The role of ‘test/quality engineer’ has grown from being seen as a support role to now being the central limelight of the entire lifecycle of product development thus leading to higher rewards, increased responsibilities, high skill requirements and most importantly higher pay packages.

But with great rewards comes great responsibilities. The role of ‘test/quality engineer’ has gradually turned into what can be compared to a multiverse. Yes, the multiverse of testing.

What is a multiverse? How can testing be a multiverse?

A Multiverse can be imagined as a universe which is beyond the known. You can also consider it as a large number of universes all combining to form a much larger entity called a multiverse.

Now let’s do a small exercise of answering a few easy questions based on your experience in the testing world.

1. Do you ever feel that you know it all (about testing)?
2. Are you ever sure when to stop (testing) digging more?
3. Does it feel like a combination of multiple universes?
4. And last but not the least, do YOU trust testing?

Your response to the above questions might have helped you to understand how testing can be considered as a ‘multiverse’. Now let’s welcome you all to the ‘Multiverse of Testing’.

Let’s deep dive into the ‘Multiverse of Testing’

The below image shows a range of planets in the form of separate roles which are a part of our multiverse. Although these planets a.k.a roles are separate universes in themselves but as test engineers, we are required to land on these planets multiple times in a day as part of our role’s R&Rs.

Let’s have a walkthrough of these planets -:

1. The first planet is the ‘Product management’ planet. As a test engineer, you should be a product person and very comfortable around discussing the user journeys, user retention & acquisition metrics and understand the primary metric for the hypothesis of any new feature being rolled out to production.
2. The second planet is the fiery one — ‘the planet of Coding’. As a test engineer, you should be comfortable with reading and writing code. Reading developer’s code will help in developing better test scenarios and test cases to verify the developer’s code. Writing code will help you to automate processes and tests to focus on tasks that deserve your full focus and intelligence.
3. The third planet is the ‘UI/UX’ planet. Understanding the designs & related user journeys with awareness of user experience (UX) such as accessibility norms is an important trait of test engineers.
4. The fourth planet is the ‘DevOps tools and culture’ planet. The secret of a successful automation project lies in the DevOps culture incorporated while developing the automation strategy. As a test engineer, you need to be comfortable with using tools such as Jenkins, docker, AWS, monitoring tools and Linux commands.
5. The fifth planet is the ‘Release engineering’ planet. Once you are comfortable with DevOps tools, you can start contributing to the planning, management and engineering aspects of your team/org’s release strategy.
6. The sixth planet is the ‘Project Management’ planet. As a test engineer, we should be using prioritisation and cost & time-saving techniques to juggle multiple tasks & tickets every day of our professional life.
7. The seventh planet is the ‘Data analytics’ planet. You should be able to understand the dashboards for various production analytics like P0 user journeys, usage patterns, load patterns, etc to test and automate better,
8. Last but not least planet is that of ‘User reviews and concerns. This is our bread & butter i.e to understand the user and prioritise his/her concerns and feedback. We have to ensure that all these concerns are reaching specific stakeholder teams as a feedback cycle and being prioritised & fixed.

But wait, where is the planet of ‘testing’ in this BIG multiverse? I will leave it to your exploration and request you to comment down the answer if you find one.

So next time someone asks you to define the ‘test engineering’ role, you can share this blog along with your own experiences to define the never-ending breadth of this great tech role.

See you next time,
Sahil Puri

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