SilkTest jobs for QA Testers.

The table below compares the demand for SilkTest 2010, HP QTP 11 and Selenium skills in QA Tester jobs advertised across US and India in October of 2010. I compared the job postings for QA Engineer position with automated testing tool experience on the following job search engines: dice.com, sfbay.craigslist.org/sof/ (only for San Francisco Bay Area) and naukri.com

dice.com craigslist.org naukri.com
SilkTest 35 6 15
QTP
560 9 302
Selenium
299 57 97

As you could see, Silktest is lagging behind of QTP or Selenium on all job markets, but I think I have an explanation why this is happening. There are plenty of QA Tester job postings like
Required skills - Test automation, SaaS, SQL, performance testing, Load Runner and QuickTest Professional, Silk Test, Java, Visual Basic.

Perhaps I should look for Silk not SilkTest, even it would include results for Silk Performer. Unfortunately as you can see below the change is not as big as I expected. I could explain why Selenium is so popular in Silicon Valley. As an open source project, Selenium is available for free and has been used for testing at many Silicon Valley companies like Google, Yahoo, and eBay. There are also a lot of startup companies not willing to spend money of SilkTest license or QTP license. That's why there are a lot of job postings for QA Testers with Selenium testing skills in Silicon Valley. In the same time I am still not sure why SilkTest lags behind of HP QTP on national markets. Does anyone have any ideas?

dice.com craigslist.org naukri.com
Silk 69 6 87
QTP 560 9 302
Selenium 299 57 97

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I know why Silk lag. SilkTest 2009 + IE8 works very bad. There are a lot of issues that have not been fixed in new SilkTest 2010 version. For example "Navigate is not registred" issue. The main Browser for SilkTest is IE, but SilkTest works very bad with it. And Borland/MicroFocus or anybody don't do anything to fix the issues. How should I to test the other Products if the testing tool lags? They are going to leave Classic agent support in future version. What should I do with my 2 200 test cases? Rewrite all of them for New agent. For what? To get IE support again? And don't tell me about multibrowser testing by SilkTest. I have had a deal with it.

Anonymous said...

I work with SilkTest+IE8 and another issue I faced with SilkTest 2009 is "Unable to start Internet Explorer 7" 0_o. I checked Extensions and all settings to make sure that I use IE8. And all settings are ok. To resolve this issue you have to save your options set again without any changes and restart SilkTest.
But I cannot overcome "Funcction Navigate is not registered" issue. Restart SilkTest helps for a shot time period, but then issue appears again.

Anonymous said...

Hello the author of this blog! Today I'm going to leave working with SilkTest 2009. It was good time, sometimes I were happy with SilkTest, sometime I were disappointed with it. It was long three years of SilkTest development as Senior Automation engineer. So, I almost happy with it. I left few comments on this blog. :-) I want to thank you for your blog and your advices, I wish you luck and happy. Many thanks.

Stan Skuratov

Anonymous said...

None of my friends have heard the name of silktest. In this world of open source and free web automation frameworks available I wonder why we have to use silktest. Except some old companies who are using this do you think there is future for this? I have not seen a single opening for qa with silktest experience for last 3 years. Wish I hadnt used this to begin with. Selenium and QTP have better jobs.

Anonymous said...

When I hear people comment that SilkTest has little or no value because there are open source tools like Selenium available, I know the person either is a developer OR new to testing. Sure Selenium can do automated testing, but there is much more to software testing and quality assurance than running a few tests scripts without human intervention. SilkTest records and playbacks. Selenium, at this time, does not do this. Sure ... someone can hire a bunch of programmers to create and run their automated test or they can purchase a tool that allows software testers (who are or have not been programmers) to run automated tests. In the long run, your cost for testing will be less using a tool like SilkTest and software testers than Selenium and a bunch or programmers. If there are testers out there who get paid as much as a programmer, don't look for another job. Stay where you are or you will watch your salary decrease.

SilkTest also works with SilkCenteral. If anyone has worked in quality assurance or software testing for more than 5 years with automated tools, you know that managing results, defects and reporting on that information can take a lot of time to collect if you are running with a tool like Selenium. SilkCenteral does all of that for you.

FYI - QTP is not cheap or free.

IN ADDITION, Selenium does not offer the functionality that SilkTest offers when it comes to recording and playing back against ExtJS, Xpath, dynamic ids and AJAX components. And, QTP is not even close to knowing what to do with XPath.

SilkTest interview questions for QA Testers