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