At Gofore, over 90 dedicated Test Automation Developers work on a variety of customer projects. Our experts often perform tasks in very independent roles, making it challenging to form a comprehensive picture of all the work we do. While existing data helps us to some extent, creating a thorough understanding of our work requires more traditional survey methods.
To gain a holistic view of the diversity of our work, we created the Test automation project radar. It is based on a survey conducted in September 2024, which received responses from 40 Goforeans. Let’s take a look at some of the key findings!
Download the Test automation project radar 2024 results (PDF).
Focused work with skilled colleagues on the side
To start, we wanted to explore team compositions and general project realities. When examining the number of simultaneous ongoing projects, it is safe to say that majority of our experts work on a single project, rather than shifting between different projects. However, some enjoy the variety of working on multiple projects simultaneously, and while this is possible, it is not the norm. Context shifting can be exhausting to the mind, and many prefer to concentrate on one project. It’s a preference that we can often accommodate. (Read more about our thoughts on healthy and sustainable work life here.)
Our consultants often work on long-term projects, sometimes staying with the same project and customer for years. Our customers are often large organisations and companies, and their projects are complex and challenging, requiring time and many contributors to complete. To give you an idea of the type and scope of the projects we work in, you can check out the work we have done for the Finnish Tax Administration or Kone.
Usually in our customer projects you will have other test automation developers by your side, be they from Gofore or otherwise. Same goes for having other Goforeans working in the same project, whether as test automation developers or in some other role. It is worth mentioning as a sidenote, that sometimes our consultants work in project teams that are composed of experts from many different companies (so called multi-vendor teams), but at increasing rates we are providing customers with teams composed of Goforeans only.
Working as “lone wolf” without other Goforeans or test automation developers at the customer project is rare, although new customer relationships have to start from somewhere. In such instances more experienced test automation developers can be great at creating trust and opening up new possibilities with customers. All the best customer partnerships have started from something small.
Covid-19 transformed our working environments, and the shift to remote and hybrid working models has come to stay. Still, the findings on how rarely our consultants actually work at customer premises is a bit surprising: only 12% are reporting they visit customer premises once a week or more, and half are reporting they never visit the customer premises.
Our observations this last year indicate that expectations to work at customer premises are slightly on the rise, but this notion is not yet supported by the survey. In any case, as a Goforean consultant it’s always best to keep an open mind in terms of being ready to travel to the customer from time to time. This is especially at the start of a new project, when trust is still developed. Outside of customer requirements and expectations, it is up to our consultants to decide whether they want to prefer to work from home or at one of our offices.
Tools of the trade
One of the main goals of the survey was to examine and create a comprehensive overview and understanding of the responsibilities our consultants have as test automation developers. Our respondents could choose multiple options from a list of different previously identified recurring tasks and responsibilities, with them ranging from highly technical development tasks to manual testing efforts.
Not surprisingly, at the core of our respondents’ responsibilities is the process of creating and updating test automation scripts, followed by CI/CD pipeline development. Library development is considered to be a more advanced effort than only using existing libraries in test automation development, but a common task nonetheless.
Manual testing activities or even managing and leading the testing process is present in many projects too. Some projects and roles within them are more focused on technical implementations, but quite often customers are looking for a versatile professional. Expert profiles with skills and interest in manual testing, test management or cloud infrastructure in addition to solid expertise in test automation scripting are especially in high demand with customers.
Another interesting specialisation is performance testing done with tools like JMeter and Locust. While performance testing is not yet well represented in our survey, we observe and anticipate plenty of demand for performance testing now and in the future.
Test automation scripts and library development is most often done with Robot Framework and Python, the most popular technology combination in our projects by far. Selenium continues to be a popular option when it comes to choosing existing web testing libraries for Robot Framework, but Browser Library is quickly gaining ground. While the representation for Playwright is low in this survey, we have observed customer demand to be on the rise for it.
Closing words and future outlooks
In conclusion, in this survey we sought out to understand the work our consultants do in our projects. Findings here about common responsibilities and project realities like their lengths and team compositions are quite well in line with our expectations, but worth sharing and talking about outside too. Based on these results, it can be concluded that our projects offer rich variety of test automation work, along with skilled colleagues and sparring partners, often wearing the same familiar Gofore orange colours.
For transparency’s sake one goal of this survey is the aim that maybe our project work would resonate with some of you who are interested in working at Gofore. If you are an experienced test automation developer looking for a new professional home, take a look at our Test Automation job advertisement and consider submitting an application to us!
In the next iteration of this survey (as we plan to make it annual!), it will be especially interesting to follow the breakthrough of AI and how it will affect test automation development. We already see in our survey, that using generative AI is quite commonplace in code generation and studying. However, testing AI applications itself requires a wholly new set of skills. It’s a challenge to respond to this demand, but one we are eager to embrace as pioneers in the digitalisation development.
