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Solution to get SDET

Challenges to find SDET and recommended solution
First let us agree on the topic "many of the organizations are advertising for SDET position". They are unable to get the right candidates. I tried my best as consultant/adviser to educate leadership team that they have to change their expectation a little to overcome this challenge but some agreed and moved on with success and others are still trying solution to their problem. 

Let me define the problem in common language so we all can converge on our individual views on this topic under discussion. 

SDET - Software Developer in Testing and expectation for this role is a huge list and I use my own order of preference to recommend a possible solution.
Any one qualify for SDET role to have certain abilities (list may grow in few cases)

  1. Tester’s mindset, curious and comes up with interesting test scenarios
  2. A solid understanding of testing principles and methodologies
  3. Learnt that all testing is exploratory in nature and more you discover as defects there is lot to know about product under test (dependencies and all we discover)
  4. Complete knowledge of appropriate test methods for a given scenario
  5. Agile development model knowledge and knows how testing fits in the agile model
  6. Knows Git, Pull Requests, Branching, etc…
  7. Understanding of HTTP and how modern web applications are built
  8. Understands CI/CD and Build pipelines
  9. Automated UI testing using some tools (script less automation - SimplifyQA is one example)
  10. Coding knowledge in at least one scripting or programming language (Java and Javascript happen to be the most popular)
  11. Knowledge of writing performance test scripts (Gatling and/or JMeter)
  12. Knowledge about security aspects of software and is aware of OWASP
  13. Knowledge of  services offered by cloud platform providers such as AWS, Azure, Linode and Google Cloud

If you notice here except 10,11 and 12 rest of the skills you will find when you interview a candidate partially or fully who applied for this post (from my experience) and some are not so tough to build with a good training in a week or so (if you have expert trainers). Skill 5,6,7,8 and 13 all you need is a good training material and some nice exercises for hands on. On top of it 11 and 12 is special skill set we normally use them as shared resource in all development models. Better to have this as special skills and define as goal in career progression along with skill number 10.

Assuming you believe in this claim of mine 91% of skills you can find easily! (10/11). Now gap is 9%. If you need let us say TWO test engineers in SCRUM team of 5-9 and ONE person can be from that 91% skills met pool. 50% of your challenge is eliminated! at SCRUM team level and if you have say TEN SCRUM team see the benefit. Career progression goals, planned  training reduced this gap further.

Appreciate different view as feedback.



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