Recently I attended a software testing conference held in Manchester. While I was at the conference I had a conversation with Andrew Morton (@TestingChef) about Twitter. Andrew told me he had a theory that at conferences people tweeted more in the morning than in the afternoon. As an active Tweeter and passionate R user I thought it would be interesting to try collect some real data, take a look and see what was happening.

Back in May I taught myself a programming language called R so that I could solve the problem of analysing large amounts of data collected as part of a survey of software testers. After writing some R code to analyse the data from my survey and blogging about the findings I realised something. I was sharing my findings with other people mainly through static images, graphs and charts. I felt like there were a large number of combinations and queries that could be applied to the data and I wasn’t able to document all of them.

Back in May I carried out a survey of Software Testers and I have been continuing to analyse these survey results. My previous blog post about the survey was well received and focused on experience in the workplace. One of the objectives I set out to achieve with the survey was to examine the backgrounds and experiences which have led testers to be where they are today. I wrote another R script to help me interpret the survey results data.

Why is it really difficult to hire testers? A few months ago I found myself involved in a number of discussions not about testing, but about testers. All the conversations I had revolved around the following questions: Why is it difficult to hire testers? How do people actually become testers? Does anyone actually choose to be a tester or do they just fall into testing by accident? Is it possible to persuade computer science students to pick a testing career over development?