Morning all -
Has anyone on here ever moved into a different role after spending time on testing focused roles?
What was the moment that made you want to move? Or was it something you just fell into
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I’m thinking about transitioning to software development within the company I’m currently in or in a new company.
I’m guessing it might be easier to transition to automation first then software development
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I have worked as part tester, part operations/release manager/developer for several years.
I tried in this order:
- Test manager - delayed for 1.5 years by the IT managers who said there needs to be a budget and reorganization first; they have never actually opened this position; they made me do the extra work meanwhile.
- Product manager within the same team, after the PM left, as I had an excellent grasp of the product from several viewpoints; Several colleagues supported it, but my manager rejected it due to a lack of assertiveness/showing leadership during meetings;
- Business operations analyst, due to my significant work and help provided to this team over the years. My interest was shown after being asked and proposed this by the Operations manager(he was hoping to let me in charge when he retires in a few years) and the Architect(who needed someone like me on some large multi-year migration project). Another manager/C-level blocked it because they wanted someone external and my manager didn’t want to let me go from the team.
This happened within 2 years. While at this company I’ve refused 2 other roles to work in other companies as a test lead and as a test manager(proposed by former colleagues). I also attempted with a few colleagues to make a software startup, which didn’t go well due to life issues and availability for all of us.
I left the company as I was not too fond of this practice.
I’m still thinking of switching to some role that involves more control from my side; reducing the feeling of being incompetent, being told what to do and how to do it by others without any serious professional testing experience.
I think it’s great to see people follow their own adapted, created path in life, even if it’s not within the same role they started it. It shows ambition, determination, and a will to learn and improve. And I hope I’ll have plenty of that in my life to get me going through another 30 years of work until pension age.
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Thinking about options to move over to OPS myself. We have to be broad in our skill set in these troubling times
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Testing manager, Development manager, Quality manager, Programmer, Customer support… I had 10 ys in testing, 15 ys in other roles, now back to where the fun is.
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Excellent, so what has brought you back to testing? And are you a “tester” role (as in actively spending your days focused on the testing/test exe), or lead/manager role?
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hi @monsieurfrench,
I’m sure most of us move into different roles, sometimes slowly other times more deliberately. Sometimes we move back too. Here are some similar threads:
There could be at least these paths, besides what is mentioned already:
- Senior or staff-level testing roles, if available in the company
- Leadership of the testing activities, quality coach, if available in context (Me)
- Management of teams, Engineering management level (1-1, hire-fire,…)
- Regulatory compliance (EUGDPR, EU-NIS2, …) (Me)
- Platform engineering and tooling
Even if testing is in your blood - you cannot be in it forever. We have to learn to build the next generation and let them run the ship. For our own health.
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Thanks you for the reply, but perhaps you’re misunderstanding the question (or I wasn’t clear enough perhaps). I am not after any advice on how to progress my own career, it was a question to see if people had moved out of testing into other roles, like project manager or BA etc. I am interested in seeing how many people stay in testing for long time, or whether for example they use testing as a spring board to other jobs
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I’ve seen quite a few become either product owner or devs. I think these are the roles it makes most sense to shift in to - it can be a fairly seamless transition for both if you have the right focus (i.e. automation or product).
It even made me wonder if QA/testing might eventually get fully subsumed by both of these roles the same way sysadmins were swapped out with devops and infrastructure engineers.
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Mostly wanting to do what I like rather than what gives status and a high income towards the end of my career.
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I’ve gone back and forth between testing and development and a few other roles, as well.
Prior to 2005, I implemented software using COBOL, C++ and Java. 2005-9 I switched to testing; after that, I went back to development: using C++, Java, PHP and AS3. It was at this point that I began to become an agile evangelist, some 15 years ago.
In 2012, I went back to testing. This was manual testing, developing test tools and implementing automated tests using Java, Groovy, JUnit, Spock, Geb, Cucumber. I was in this role for over a decade. At points I was a lead tester, lead developer and scrum master. In the latter years of this role I was teaching/mentoring Angular development and also implementing UI designs in Figma.
For the last year or two, I was in a freelance role which started as testing, but ended up with me implementing a mobile app with Ionic Vue, learning Ruby on Rails and working on the backend - and also doing some agile coaching & UI design as well. In this role, I used Cypress to test the mobile app and at the end, started picking up Playwright.
I am currently not in a role and open to work… 
I am a generalist focused on making good software. My testing experience has definitely informed my software development. I consider it to have made me a better developer. My development experience has, in turn, informed my testing. I do not believe that you can be a good developer without also being a good tester.
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Speaking about testing, there is room to move inside the field, I mean you can switch to more managerial or leadership roles in the QA field with less technical aspects, or you can move towards more technical roles as SDET or performance tester. Personally, I’m gradually moving up by career ladder to managerial and leadership roles but because I have 10+ years of experience in QA and testing I’m talking about roles such as QA Manager, QA Team Lead, Head of QA, etc. I also tried to switch to business and system analyst (and then to a product manager/feature owner) roles but probably I wasn’t determined enough and didn’t have the right opportunities at that moment. Anyway, learning relevant stuff was really helpful in becoming a better QA Engineer. I also worked hard and thought a lot (and probably still think sometimes) about switching to cybersecurity, roles such as penetration tester or information security engineer. I haven’t done this because of different reasons but I can say that with enough luck and particular circumstances in your life, you can do this. I have some skills in pentesting and some knowledge in cybersecurity so anyway it was very useful for my QA engineering development. I also tried game design and learned some stuff from this field too but again I’m still in QA and testing 
I can’t say that there was something in particular that forced me to switch to different roles, I had different reasons and motivations in trying so, and what is the most important is that I was interested in these fields (and I’m still interested)
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