InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

The year 2000 bug has highlighted the need for quality testing and caused a surge in demand for Y2K testing specialists. However, industry experts say the profession had been enjoying increasing demand for its services before widespread awareness of the Y2K bug--and will likely continue to do so well past the year 2000.

"There was a time when no one wanted to be in testing," says Daniel Hines, manager of mid-Atlantic recruiting for Pencom Systems Inc., a New York IT employment agency. "Today, however, there are many more exciting opportunities for testers--as well as compensation to match."

Though software testing was once considered a lowly step to a job as a software developer, it's now viewed by many as a creatively and monetarily rewarding profession worthy of long-term commitment. And despite the increasing appeal of software testing, the profession is still a great place to get a start in software engineering.

As recently as five years ago, testers were more or less "button pushers" who carried out testing programs developed by software engineers, says Hines. But now, more companies--both software vendors and IT departments--are setting up quality-assurance groups that give testers broader roles in the software-development process and more engineering challenges such as creating analytic tools.

"Earlier in the decade, companies would just pull in whomever they could and have them run the applications to see if they were OK," says Melanie Ledford, an IT manager with Wellmark International, a Bensonville, Ill., manufacturer of animal health-care products. "Testing is now a part of the project-development life cycle from the beginning."

That's been the experience of Doug Preyna, a testing professional since 1992 who is on contract with ComForce Information Technologies Inc., a high-tech recruiter in Woodbury, N.Y. Preyna says that early in his career, he was viewed as an assistant to developers, and programmers told him exactly what to test and how to test it. Just a few years ago, software developers were resistant to having their work scrutinized by a tester, who they viewed as less skilled, Preyna says.

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Photo by Scott Robinson