There are many instances where you can find testers saying this, "I do not have programming skills, so took up testing". And there are people who took software testing by choice, I'm proud that I belong to the later.
Well coming to the point, when testers say "I do not have programming skills", well that's alright -alright in the beginning. Otherwise you should become exceptionally good at testing without the use of coding knowledge(people call it as Manual testing), and you should showcase it, and that's hard to achieve, since many good great testers do code!
If you think that, only developers earn better than testers, I'm here to say, it's not. Good testers with programming skills earn equally or even better than the developers.
So, testers, if you're into testing for more than a year or just initiated, please learn any programming language, that will give you some insight, you can have a better control of what you're looking at and how it is driven, from where you will get more knowledge/power to break it -think Tester.
Snippet from Elisabeth Hendrickson's blog post, with some statistical records,
The bottom line is that our numbers indicate approximately 80% of the job ads you’d find if searching for jobs in Software QA or Test are asking for programming skills.No matter my personal beliefs, that data suggests that anyone who is serious about a career in testing would do well to pick up at least one programming language.So which programming languages should you pick up? Here were the top 10 mentioned programming languages (including both required and nice-to-haves):
- SQL or relational database skills (84)
- Java, including J2EE and EJBs (52)
- Perl (44)
- Python (39)
- C/C++ (30)
- Shell Scripting (27) note: an additional 4 mentioned batch files.
- JavaScript (24)
- C# (23)
- .NET including VB.NET and ASP.NET but not C# (19)
- Ruby (9)
Great Learning!!!!
