Early in my professional career I found myself in a constant battle with outsourcing. As soon as I got wind that my role was to be outsourced I would start looking around for the next opportunity and master the skills required quickly. I would then have a period of both starting my new role while handing over the last one.
This kept happening so I would “up” my game. I moved from being a manual tester to test automation learning various tools and programming languages along the way. Yet outsourcing kept pace. I next moved from test automation to performance testing. I not only had outsourcing to contend with but now I was competing with automation frameworks that were replacing the need for actual testers.
I kept this up for many years specialising in specific frameworks, tools, and having a broad range of test skills. I even stepped into security testing becoming a penetration tester but then I found myself up against pentesters who had certified in India for a fraction of the cost and that could undertake the work remotely for less than the cost of living here. So I switched again from freelance to employee switching to domain expertise. Now I found myself up against AI.
AI and ML is offering companies a faster, cheaper way to detect bugs and identify UI/UX issues, and to offer improvements based on real-time analysis of how users are using the software or service under test.
It can be disheartening when you see your profession slowly being reduced to a computer program, but such is the nature of the industry, and I’ve enjoyed the journey and everything I learned along the way. You have to keep learning and evolving in order to stay in the game or face being made obsolete.