I can say, having done this transition myself in 2005 (and back again a year later), that a good test automation job can be extremely rewarding, and very often you get a lot of exposure as "they guy who kept us from shipping something stupid". Since testing staff is very often much smaller than engineering staff, you have a chance to really stand out .. or screw up. There's a fair amount of pressure involved if you're the lead (or sole) tester for a product.

It's a very different kind of experience from plain old programming (ask me sometime about the week I spent devising and automating adult search tests - two weeks of surfing porm for a living!). If you don't already enjoy writing tests for your own code, you're not going to enjoy doing it for others.

Test automation can be an "in" to an interesting organization that you might not otherwise be considered for. If you do like testing your code and enjoy thinking up new ways to break things, and you like to invent stuff and repurpose things for your own nefarious purposes, or if you like to "run and find out" more than dig in and fix stuff, then test automation may be a good fit for you. A short attention span may actually be a plus.

Also, as the testing person, you have the opportunity to help shape the company's overall development style - things like influencing the adoption of unit testing, of source control, change control, and so on. Remember that automated testing also covers stuff like whether deployments work, whether the code submitted as the release candidate is good, and so on.

Testing can be fantastically rewarding as long as you approach it as something you want to bring all of your ability to; if you look at it as a "second best" then you won't enjoy it or do a good job at it. And if you show talent as a test tool builder, you may find that you're in demand as a programmer in general.

In reply to Re: moving to a testing automation project by pemungkah
in thread moving to a testing automation project by Anonymous Monk

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