Helios erp Systems: Career In Software Testing Vs. Software Development

Typically most big IT industries will take up projects from overseas clients and have engineers work on them. This leads to two career paths — Software Testing & Software Development. Overall — the software development teams are responsible for ‘coding’ and software testing teams are responsible for making sure that everything adheres to the specifications of the software being developed.

Roles Played By Software Developers Vs. Software Testers :
Typically there would be ‘two’ teams working in sync on a project because both development and testing cannot be separated. Every written code must be checked for quality and without any team not existing — it’d be impossible to create the final software. The point I’m driving home is that both software development and testing teams are equally important. It’s a myth that software ‘testing’ is kind of a ‘lower’ job as compared to software development.

When any project begins — both software development and testing teams get involved from day 1. While the actual job of software developers begins much later, software testing teams usually begins right at the time of verifying the specification documents and continues throughout the life cycle of the project. It’d not be wrong to say that software testing teams often have a better knowledge of the overall functioning of the software systems they are working on.

Software development, is one of the most crucial parts because without it, nothing gets ‘developed’. Project manager or team lead will assign specific modules to you which you will have to code according to the specifications finalised by the software testing & business development teams. Every module developed by the developers is checked by the testing team and approved.

Skill Set Requirements:
For Developers: The developer skill set will be determined by the nature of the project and the technology stack decided by the software architects (much senior position in the organisation). If the architects decide that a combo of Java, C, Ruby, Python would be used in the project then accordingly developers will be selected who are trained on these technologies.

For Test Engineers: They require entirely different skill set which could be a mix of Java, C, Ruby, Python along with software manual and automation tools along with scripting languages. There are several automation tools that require programming knowledge. It’s a myth that software testing engineers do not write code. Given the complexity of the project a software testing engineer might end up writing more complex code than his developer counterpart. The point to be understood is that — both development and testing jobs require you to have programming knowledge.