In-Demand Skills for Software Testing

LinkUp job listing data, collected daily and directly from company websites, can add crucial insight into market trends, evolving industry practices, and role-specific framework standards at the industry level.

Using LinkUp’s reservoir of job listing data, scholars from the University of Genova analyzed millions of job listings to explore the relevance of the testing phase in software development, which testing categories are the most adopted (e.g., unit vs. acceptance vs. end-to-end as well as manual vs. automated), and which frameworks and tools are the most used in practice. Because job listings often include software familiarity, coding language, or operational requirements, they are a direct source of information regarding what skills are most in-demand for software developers or engineers.

"We can conclude that automated testing dominates the job advertisements scene since it is by far more required than manual testing for both Coders and Tester. Comparing ads mentioning just one of the two types, the ratio between the two is negligible, and even disregarding tools, it ranges from 1:20 (an advertisement concerning manual testing every 20 for automated testing) for testers to less than 1:100 for coders.Taking into account also those advertisements mentioning both categories, the ratio between the advertisements concerning automatic and manual testing ranges from 1:5 for testers disregarding tools to slightly more than 1:100 for coders considering tools."

Maura Cerioli, Maurizio Leotta, and Filippo Ricca. 2020. What 5 million job advertisements tell us about testing: a preliminary empirical investigation. In Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1586–1594. https://doi.org/10.1145/334110