What is SDET? - DevX School - IT Coding Bootcamp

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What is SDET?

SDET stands for Software Development Engineer in Test, also know as Software Engineer in Test, Quality Assurance Automation Engineer.

All of these job titles refer to the same thing.

In order to understand what SDET is we need to understand what Quality Assurance is in Technology projects. Imagine a Paypal project where people use technology to send money to each other. Since this technology is dealing with money directly Paypal as a company have to be extremely careful about issues. As a programmer you write thousands of lines of code to get your program up and running. It’s extremely easy to make mistakes like misspelling, miscalculating simple formulas. Imagine PayPal programmer made a mistake he/she added extra 0 in the sending amount. Now PayPal users send $1000 instead of $100. Given that PayPal has millions of transactions per minute, there is a possibility for PayPal to lose billions in just a minute. Money loss is not only problem PayPal will face, It’s reputation will be damaged significantly which will lead clients to leave the platform. So In order avoid such situtation every company must invest heavily into testing. Testing in IT world is called Quality Assurance(QA). Every technology requires detailed testing. There are multiple levels of testing and each level of testing needs to be performed every time there is a new change in the program. Which is daily or weekly.

6-7 years ago most companies would perform all QA activities manually, thus hiring a manual QA. One manual QA’s salary is about 70K/month. However one manual QA takes up to one week to fully test the program. If we have 3 layers of testing it’s 3 weeks to just get an approval from QA that our program works or not. In modern tech world competition is intensive, so you can not beat competition with such a slow pace. As a company, how do we solve the delivery speed problem? Most straight forward one is to hire 10 QAs for each level and finish QA process in 1 or 2 days. Sounds good, however now company pays $700K just for QA. Solved one problem introduced another problem. Budget for QA is too big. for so long companies have been trying to figure out this problem. So that’s where SDETs come into rescue. SDETs are technically skilled engineers who can write programs that will automate the manual QA process. SDETs build robots that will test an application in just 2 hours. That’s the reason why our graduates earn $100k+ as SDETs. For companies it’s getting the job done for 600K less.