Typical tester? More diverse than you think

Clichés about IT specialists claim that they are introverted, not very sociable and fixated on a single interest. An industry survey of testers shows the opposite: only 6% fit this stereotype. Testers come from theater studies, urban planning, boat building and art backgrounds, bring a variety of degrees and cover technical and non-technical roles alike.

Key Takeaways

• Only 6% of the testers surveyed fit the classic IT stereotype of introverted, socially isolated nerds with a single focus of interest.
• Testers come from professional backgrounds such as boat building, theater studies, urban planning and international relations, showing that IT competence does not require a one-size-fits-all educational background.
• An IT degree does not predict whether someone will take on technical roles: 40% of humanities graduates worked in test automation, 40% of IT graduates did not work in technical roles.
• Recruitment databases and career guides actively reproduce the stereotype by encouraging the stereotypical IT type to apply, systematically limiting diversity.
• Isabel Evans has developed 12 heuristics in question form to help tool developers and evaluators better match testing tools to real user needs.

The testing cliché does not stand up to reality

Testers are far more diverse than the common IT stereotype claims. An industry survey by Isabel Evans provides hard data instead of gut feeling. She distributed open questionnaires via online networks and conferences and asked not only about working methods and tools, but also about hobbies and background.

The result: testers come from a wide variety of backgrounds. Boatbuilding, theater studies, international relations, urban planning, fine arts. The original version of the article was therefore entitled “From Artists to Town Planners”, later renamed “Breaking Stereotypes”.

The range of hobbies is striking. Many respondents stated artistic interests, often several at the same time. This does not fit in with the image of the narrow-minded lone wolf who fixates on a single special interest.

What does the IT cliché actually say?

The cliché describes a person who is not very sociable, not interested in art, doesn’t talk much and is fixated on a single hobby. In other words, a nerdy, idiosyncratic type.

This image is no coincidence. It can be found in recruitment databases and career choice guides. Anyone who looks it up will read: If you’re that type of person, go into IT. The cliché acts as a filter before someone is even hired.

Isabel Evans draws on a study by McChesney, which examined precisely this comparison: people who wanted to work in IT versus people who actually worked in IT, measured against the cliché from the databases.

Only a small proportion of testers fit the mold

In Isabel’s group of testers, only 6 percent fit the IT stereotype. In McChesney’s general IT sample, the figure was around 26 to 30 percent. A considerable proportion, but by no means the majority.

The applicants who aspired to an IT career were more likely to fit the stereotype than the people who were already doing the job. So the recruitment process narrows the list of those who feel encouraged to go into IT in the first place.

This creates a practical problem. If software is supposed to map the whole world, but only a small group builds and tests it, there is no connection to reality. Diversity in the team is not an end in itself, but a question of who the software ultimately reaches.

The degree says little about the later role

The educational background of testers ranges from humanities to natural and social sciences to people with no university degree at all. And the degree hardly predicts what role someone will later take on.

The figures contradict the obvious expectation. Around 40 percent of humanities graduates worked in test automation or technical testing roles. At the same time, around 40 percent of IT graduates did not work in any technical role at all.

So anyone who assumes that a humanities background automatically leads to test management and a computer science degree to automation is wrong. The degree reveals neither the talent nor the preferences.

The study background shapes how testers communicate

There is a correlation between the field of study and the way testers write about their work. Isabel Evans modeled the communication styles from the open-ended responses.

The patterns were clear:

This makes an argument for mixed teams. Humanities scholars and social scientists carry the story through the company and talk to other departments. Natural scientists bring order and structure. IT graduates provide the technical skills, but often without the communicative side.

A team needs all these voices to identify risks and clarify what each needs from the other.

Tools fail because of usability, not because of appearance

The starting point for the research was the experiences of testers with their tools. These experiences often affected the quality of life: a lot of frustration, strong emotional reactions, occasionally also positive feelings. That alone is reason enough to take care of well-being in the workplace.

The real quality characteristic that users grated on was usability, not superficial user-friendliness. The central question was: Can I continue my workflow? Can I reach my goal with the tool?

This gave rise to the concept of the illusion of user-friendliness. Tools are bought because they have pretty interfaces. At first glance, they seem easy to use, but as soon as you start working, the tool does not support your own testing methods.

These findings do not come from leading questions. The interviewees were asked to talk about their experience with the tool. The underlying technical and qualitative features were only revealed by evaluating the open answers.

Twelve heuristics instead of a ready-made framework

The data did not result in an all-encompassing framework, but rather a set of twelve heuristics, formulated as questions. The original plan to build a model that would derive the ideal test tool from inputs failed due to the number of variables.

The impetus came from Hussein Dugan, a researcher at another university. His advice: don’t write a tool to build tools, don’t try to solve the whole problem, but derive heuristics from the available evidence.

The heuristics are a tool to use in thinking. They are a stimulus for thought, not ready-made answers.

• Isabel Evans

The twelve questions are deliberately kept open because there is no single answer. You don’t work through them stubbornly from one to twelve. In case studies, users used them differently depending on the context: they preferred individual questions, changed the order or returned to a question later in the process.

The heuristics are aimed at all sides of tool practice. Teams that build tools internally, developers of open-source tools, vendors and people who evaluate tools can adopt them. The plan is to publish them under a Creative Commons license so that anyone can use them freely.

If you want diversity, you have to start with recruitment

Reliable data belongs in the hands of personnel managers and recruiters. That’s where the stereotype sits, narrowing down applicant selection long before a person is hired.

The benefits go beyond testing. The same evidence helps in the search for developers, UX professionals, product owners, systems analysts and architects. A study that shows how broad the backgrounds of successful IT people are gives you a concrete argument.

In practical terms, this means: take the evidence, present it to your HR department or line manager and get the conversation going. If you want to keep IT and testing fit for the future, you need people who reflect the rest of the world, not just a single stereotype.