Comparing the Popularity of Testing Careers among Canadian, Indian, Chinese, and Malaysian Students

This study attempts to understand motivators and de-motivators that influence the decisions of software students to take up and sustain software testing careers across four different countries, Canada, India, China, and Malaysia. Towards that end, we have developed a cross-sectional, but simple, survey-based instrument. In this study we investigated how software engineering and computer science students perceive and value what they do and their environmental settings. This study found that very few students are keen to take up software testing careers - why is this happening with such an important task in the software life cycle? The common advantages of a software testing career are learning opportunities and easiness of the job and the common drawbacks are tediousness, complexity, and missing the opportunity to do (software) development. Our findings highlight the importance of depicting software testing activities as a set of human-dependent tasks, and emphasizes the need for research that critically examines the way in which software testers view testing activities.