Our world is changing all the time. When I had my first job
interview as a tester I just had to answer three questions with
'yes' to get the job (I see in your CV you did a course on testing,
it that so? And you want to be a tester on our project? Are you
serious about this?). By now we don't get away with a three day
testing course. We need to have at least one certificate on
testing, we need to have knowledge of software development, we need
to have good personal skills and preferably we need to have
knowledge of the business processes of the organization where we
work. And still clients are asking for more and more knowledge and
skills. When we work in agile teams we need to have collaboration
skills. As test managers we need to have managerial skills. As test
consultants we need to have persuasiveness and political skills. So
we need to work on our soft skills. But what about our hard skills?
As Erik van Veenendaal stated in Testing Experience 04/11 we need
to specialize (e.g. security testing, performance testing, chain
testing) to broaden. But how can we broaden? In which direction
should we broaden?
In my personal opinion we should broaden our knowledge and work
field in the direction of requirements engineering. For a couple of
years now I have the vision that requirements engineering and
testing can be combined in one person, since a year or two
different testers showed in practice combining requirements
engineering and testing is very well possible and has a lot of
benefits. In practice we have shown that combining requirements
engineering and testing lowers the need for communication and
coordination, saves time and money and makes sure testers are
involved early in the project. And it can very well be a possible
future for testing. This way the testing phase is death (Gojko
Adzic, Eurostar 2011) and we don't have to call ourselves testers
anymore (James Whittaker, Eurostar 2011).
But what has IREB got to do with this? Well, it's the biggest and
best known requirements engineering certificate. Having your IREB
certificate is surely a precondition for making the step from
tester to requirements & testing engineer. And even when you
don't become a requirements & testing engineer you learn a lot
about ICT-project by doing an IREB foundation course. Another
vision I have is that we talk and learn too much about testing. By
now we know enough about testing techniques, test strategies, test
approaches, test methods et cetera. I think we should not deepen
our test knowledge but we should broaden our knowledge.
Some last words on the criticism concerning certification. Of
course, ten years experience is worth more than a foundation
certificate. And of course, just having your foundation certificate
doesn't make you a good requirements engineer. But having a
certificate surely shows that you have the basic knowledge and
people who don't are not interested in the subject won't invest the
time and money in the certification. So it proves at least
something.
I hope not every tutorial and every presentation on Eurostar 2012
is about testing.