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

Silk Test Interview Question 73: Silktest vs QTP comparasion?

I'm always surprised to read in the requirement for Automation Test Engineer something like "5+ years test automation experience, including contributing to automation framework development and developing and maintaining Seque SilkTest or HP / Mercury QTP test suites". For me it means that hiring company does not have any test automation tools at all and you will be the very first test automation engineer to hire. In the same time I consider this QA interview questions "describe advantages and disadvantages of HP QTP vs SilkTest" as perfectly valid software engineer interview question.

Let's take a look on both test automation tool and compare QTP vs Silktest without any comparison tables.

HP QTP and Silktest have one major drawback in common there is no a single HP QTP book or SilkTest book published yet except tutorials you get in the box. It means in case you want to advance your career as test automation engineer you have to take an expensive courses.

HP QTP fits more for less technical tester who will just try to do a basic record-and-playback. The Quality Assurance Engineer with object oriented programming experience should select SilkTest as tool in case s/he wants to treat automated testing as real development project.

Borland SilkTest works with 4Test scripting language and Java programming language with a help of Silk4j Eclipse Plugin, while HP QTP works with a scripting language implemented on top of VBScript. In both cases you need to have someone familiar with language. Consider to take a look on Selenium, because Selenium allow to code test scripts in Java, .Net, Perl, Python, Ruby and PHP.

Most critical part in selection test automation tool is what type of application you want to test. SQA Engineer should evaluate HP QTP, Silktest and probably Selenium against testing requirement and then make a decision.

Update
A few QTP books have been released recently on market, for detailed review look at review Best Books for QTP

Silktest jobs

Looks like job market for Silktest QA engineer shrank dramatically in the last few year. Based on this two years old post open position for test automation tool specialist, there was 184 open SilkTest position on Dice.com, and 17 Silktest jobs on sfbay.craigslist.org. Right now these jobs search engines offer just 54 and 4 Silk Test jobs respectively. Where did all the jobs go? One may think that most of these jobs were outsourced to भारत गणराज्य, but how about 104 results for Selenium jobs on dice.com and 23 open Selenium position in sfbay.craigslist.org. It seems despite Borland's efforts to revive SilkTest, more and more companies are looking for free open source test automation tool like Selenium. Perhaps Borland should start slashing SilkTest price ?

SilkTest Question 71: Does SilkTest support Chrome browser?

Today Google officially released a test version of its Internet browser called Chrome. It is definitely exceptionally early to expect that Borland would provide support for Chrome browsers in SilkTest in the nearby future. Keep in mind that Internet Explorer is still commands more than 75 percent of the world browser market. In mean time, download Chrome browser and became proverbial with new kid on the search-engine world. If you really believe that your company would expect quality assurance team to test application in Chrome browser, look at Selenium open source test automation tool. Not long ago, the creator of Selenium Jason Randolph Huggins was hired by Google, and I expect that support for Chrome browser would appear in Selenium much faster then in SilkTest. So download Chrome browser on your machine and take pleasure in more cross browser testing.

SilkTest interview question 66: SilkTest vs Selenium?

Lately one of the interns, who works for our company for training rather than only employment, asked me to make a suggestion to choose between SilkTest and Selenium as carrier path for future Quality Assurance Engineer position.

Let's take a detailed glance and evaluate both test automated tools against each other:

The benefits of Selenium is completely free open source test automation tool, while SilkTest price is around a few thousand dollars per license. It means if you want to include Selenium to your talent set, just download free application, download manual and start testing. SilkTest download is not free, and available only for Borland customers, although everyone may download Silk Test free trial version, but it will help you for 30 days and then you will get bombarded by Borland sales asking to buy test automation tool.

There are no a single SilkTest book or tutorial in print yet except SilkTest Getting Started Tutorial, comparing with several recently published Selenium and QTP books. Quality Assurance society anticipate more Selenium books in the nearest future. For for detailed book review look at Best Books for QTP and Top Books for Selenium posts.

Selenium allows creating automated test cases only against web applications. In the same time Quality Assurance Engineer may use Silk Test for automating client server application. Selenium gracefully supports a broad range of browsers Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera or Konqueror on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. In the same time Silk Test is restricted to Internet Explorer and Firefox on Windows.
SilkTest uses 4Test scripting language to describe the test procedure, and to manipulate the objects and pedals of the application under test. One more benefits of Selenium has lots of language bindings like Java, .Net, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, so anyone can learn not only one tool, but add a few more lines in the resume.
Last thing to check is to visit any employment search sites like dice.com or monster.com and compare how many opening are available for SilkTest or Selenium.