Today, we bring to you a list of top 5 books for QA engineers who are just entering this interesting yet difficult field of the tech world, accorting to Apiumhub.

Testing Computer Software
Authors. Nguyen, Jack Falk

This book is a true classic that is well suited for beginning QA engineers. The authors thoroughly cover a wide range of issues from the organization of the QA process to the actual testing of documentation, code, projects, and more. The book will provide you with the right tools to approach software testing, and also give you information that would be extremely useful.

In the pages of the book, you will find testing techniques used in agile development approaches.

Testing Computer Software
Author: Lee Copeland

Again the same title but different content. IT professionals identify this book as one of the best books for QA engineers that can be very useful for professionals at different levels. It only covers test design and does not address the issues of test planning and process organization. In it you can find both new methods and in-depth descriptions of already known ones. For example, “Testing Computer Software” describes seven “black box” and several “white box” testing approaches.

At the end of the book there is a section with conclusions and a list of other authors’ works on the subject that may also be useful.

How Google Tests Software
Authors: James Whittaker, Jason Arbon, Jeff Carollo

This book describes how the best QA professionals conduct their tests. The book provides an overview of Google’s approach to software testing, followed by chapters on the two roles of a test engineer at Google, namely the roles of software test engineer (SET) and test engineer (TE). Throughout the book there are sections and interviews with many other Google employees, with the final chapter devoted to some advice on testing at Google.

Lessons Learned in Software Testing
Authors: Cem Kaner, James Bach, Bret Pettichord

This book is a gem for QA engineers, offering a rich array of tips, hints, and techniques suitable for both novices and seasoned professionals in software testing. It delves into essential areas such as testing techniques, automated testing (with insightful discussions on its limitations), test documentation, and project management.

The book proceeds to enlighten readers on cultivating a tester’s mindset and provides intriguing cross-disciplinary references for improving testing practices. Further chapters discuss various testing techniques, bug identification and resolution, and the nuances of test automation.

Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams
Authors: Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory

This book introduces the concept of Agile testing quadrants as a framework for determining testing needs, identifying suitable testers, and selecting appropriate tools. Here are some essential takeaways for QA engineers:

• How to get testers engaged in agile development
• Where testers and QA managers fit on an agile team
• What to look for when hiring an agile tester
• How to transition from a traditional cycle to agile development
• How to complete testing activities in short iterations
• How to use tests to successfully guide development
• How to overcome barriers to test automation

Every engineering manager is different, as are their roles, responsibilities, and ideas for improving their teams. However, across the spectrum, there are a few common challenges that every manager faces when entering the software industry.

The Biggest Challenges for the Engineering Manager

High SDLC Blockers, and Low Workflow Visibility
Today’s SDLC is driven by the culture of continuous improvement and ongoing iterations. It is an engineering manager’s role to figure out the impediments their devs face, challenges in delivering results, or the processes needing some optimization. A weak SDLC is a silent velocity killer, yet most managers find it challenging to know the ‘what’ and ‘why’ behind it. While talking to 100s of EM, we found that managers do know something in their present process is lagging, and have metrics results as north-stars; they just don’t have the right indicators or approach to move forward. One reason behind the persistent manager conundrum is limited visibility.

Most managers we talked to struggled because their teams were not making enough deliveries, and deemed ‘slow’. Looking at the cycle time metric gave them limited value, however, after centralizing all process indicators in one place, they could see that devs were working outside work hours, and the workload became unendurable. Only when managers got full-fledged visibility into the issue, they could create a plan of action, reconfigure the team’s time and tasks, and earn trust of teammates.

Broken Communication
Alignment issues and context switching between software teams are real, and most engineering managers have largely recognized the persistent issue. And that’s where the second top challenge of an engineering manager lies- to resolve communication debts stemming out of the two.

Engineering managers need to be constantly updated with their dev’s work items. The idea is to take stock of the present team status: what the engineers are doing, their blockers, and how to move forward. That’s why standups were originally invented. But, most standups today are more or less about status updates and rarely end with some constructive feedback, or discussing blockers.

Even after hour-long calls, devs might not have clarity over how to resolve their blockers. Ever happened to know that your devs are frustrated because of work, but couldn’t figure out why? Pining devs for constant updates might alienate them from managers- their best buddies/mentors/support system at work. Ongoingly, it can hurt the team’s focus hours irrevocably, even hurting developer productivity. EMs now need to find a balance between taking status updates, and ‘qualitatively’ resolving dev barriers.

Developer Burnout
When it comes to the developer ecosystem, everything is related and interconnected. Developer burnout has become a common workplace phenomenon, with over 82% of developers going through reversal burnout symptoms. An engineering manager is considered a pillar of support for their devs and is expected to help navigate the crisis with much empathy, and a plan of action to get them back in shape, and spirits.

However, managers cannot be of much help to devs if they don’t know what causes this alienation in the first place. Figuring out the reasons for your dev’s withdrawal, and lacking enthusiasm is a key priority challenge for leaders today. In the same survey above, 77% of developers have accepted that their managers are not aware of what’s happening. The causes could be anything; from overwhelming adhoc requests to dysfunctional work conditions, incident alerts, and debugging outside work hours. Since EMs are already dealing with work visibility challenges, these signs often come too late to them. By then, either their high-performing devs quit, become disengaged, or face a powerful loss in their productivity.

Unsustainable Workload
Workload distribution among members may sound like a direct task, but it’s complicated and hands down, one of the hardest for an engineering manager. In a SmartBrief survey, only 29% of engineering leaders were fairly confident of their workload distribution. The issue rapidly snowballs into frustrated devs if managers have low visibility into the engineering workloads (the big deal about visibility, eh?). Sometimes, the work allotment is done without accounting for geographical barriers, past trends of progress, and existing work share. Your next sprints are destined to go down if devs are not able to clear their previous backlogs owing to overburdening work.

Poor Developer Experience
Devs are good at switching teams, based on their career progress, happiness, or overall satisfaction. However, for EMs, this transition is like a double-edged sword- core hours devoted by devs per project are decreasing, while the training, and recruiting time keeps increasing. And that’s why protecting developer experience by managers becomes vital to the future of a company.

Good DX doesn’t necessarily have to follow Steve Jobs’ come-make-it-your-world approach, so much as it’s about improving a developer’s involvement, and satisfaction with the current workflow. If your current process has long code review periods, workload imbalance, security issues, frequent firefighting, flaky builds, high incident and interview workloads, and devs had to undergo frequent context switching and technical debt; then your life as an engineering manager might take a lot of toils.

While the DevOps era has spawned tremendous innovation ranging from CI/CD, automated testing, and agile planning, the struggle to connect the innovations built through application development to the ways that customers experience those applications remains a challenge.

“The DevOps movement created years ago created an entirely new way to build software, yet there are still holes when it comes to the way customers interact with and experience applications today. With the Galaxy Product Release, LaunchDarkly hopes to provide engineering teams with a North Star that will solve for these gaps”, said Dan Rogers, CEO at LaunchDarkly.

The LaunchDarkly platform was built to guide engineers to the next frontier of DevOps by:

• Improving the velocity and stability of software releases, without the fear of end customer outages
• Delivering targeted experiences by easily personalizing features to customer cohorts
• Maximizing the business impact of every feature through the ability to experiment and optimize
• Coordinating the release and optimization of software to provide consistent experiences across mobile platforms and device types
• Improving the effectiveness and productivity of your engineering teams, by providing insights into engineering cadence and stability

“LaunchDarkly has helped JupiterOne’s software development teams unlock the power to release our software both faster and safer. We’re looking forward to diving into LaunchDarkly’s newly launched core capabilities into areas like product experimentation, release targeting, and measurement to see how they can continue to be such a successful component of our software delivery practices”, said DJ Spatoulas, Principal Architect at JupiterOne.

With this release, LaunchDarkly is continuing toward its vision of providing not just better developer experiences, but better customer experiences. The Galaxy Product Release includes:

• New capabilities to release stable features faster, including Release Assistant, to build pre-defined, repeatable paths for progressive rollouts, alongside Release Guardian, which allows teams to quickly identify and remediate operational regressions.
• Migration Assistant to reduce the risk of a migration such as an outage, data loss, or latency, while maintaining data consistency between data stores.
• Segment Builder to easily target customer groups with specific experiences through functionality that will sync and manage segments from existing data sources.
• Enhancements to LaunchDarkly’s Product Experimentation product, a new Funnel Experiments capability to measure and optimize customer behavior across full customer journeys. Mobile Release
• Optimization to liberate your mobile releases from app store processes and easily manage the full lifecycle of your apps.
• Engineering Insights Hub to help engineering leaders track velocity and quality metrics that show the measurable progress toward engineering transformation.

C++ can be found in video games, servers, databases and many areas. It is also actively used in the blockchain ecosystem, and Bitcoin or the Solidity smart contract language are written entirely in C++. In 2022, C++ ranks eighth on the list of highest paid programming languages according to a DevJobs Scanner survey.

And according to the TIOBE index, C++ is among the most commonly used programming languages along with Python and Java. The salaries earned by C++, Java and Python programmers are getting higher. Therefore, choosing a career in programming as well as gaining knowledge in C++, Java and Python would be an excellent start towards building your better future.

But what are the annual salaries for Python, Java and C++? eFinancialCareers takes a look at the 2023 Developer Report from engineering analytics company Stack Overflow, which ranks the top three highest-paying three of the world’s most-used programming languages.

Let’s find out.

See in our gallery what are the annual salaries for Java, C++ and Python.

Fun fact: The value of programming has increased to such an extent that in India’s new education strategy, it is taught to students as early as sixth grade.

To be successful and in demand in the IT sector today, you need to have experience with different programming languages. Among the hundreds of choices, mastering the best programming languages for engineers is critical to career advancement. Choose carefully and wisely to navigate the dynamic world of technology and secure your professional future.

In this article, we will introduce you to some of the best programming languages for engineers, presented by Analytics Insights, which you will find extremely useful.

Top 5 Programming Languages for Engineers

Bash
IT operations engineers can’t ignore the importance of Bash, the main shell language used in most Linux distributions. It’s not only important for Linux system administration, but also for cloud environments and various tools, making it indispensable for cross-platform IT engineers.

PowerShell
PowerShell is important for teams that manage Windows systems and enables IT engineers to create scripts and automate various tasks. In addition, the language provides access to many Windows administrative functions, although GUIs are available for many of them.

Java
Of course, whatever ranking we present to you, Java will always be involved. It is a universal programming language that is widely used in engineering due to its platform independence. It’s important for application development, including Android apps, and is popular in embedded systems and web development.

Angular.js
Angular.js is another front-end development language that has been gaining popularity in recent years. It helps develop user interfaces for web applications from a single page. Mastering Angular.js can be of great benefit to your career as it remains relatively new and offers opportunities for rapid growth in this field.

Python
Python is among the most popular programming languages. It is a high-level, widely used by engineers and scientists in AI, ML, and data science. If you’re interested in a career in these fields, mastering Python is your first step to success. Python’s versatility extends to a variety of other fields, making it a valuable language for career development.

They also play an important role in the maintenance of software systems. They are responsible for ensuring that the software remains functional, secure and up-to-date by adapting it to changing needs and whenever a problem occurs it is their job to solve it.

Software engineers are professionals who play a key role in the development and maintenance of software systems. They possess a unique combination of technical skills, problem-solving abilities and creativity to create innovative and effective solutions. You’re hardly surprised by everything written about software engineers so far. But what don’t I know about them? In this article, we’ll introduce you to 10 facts, presented by SpringBoard about software engineers that you never even suspected.

10 Facts You Didn’t Know About Software Engineers

Fact #1
Software engineers are responsible for designing, coding, testing and debugging software applications. They work with programming languages such as Java, C++, Python and Ruby to implement their ideas and create functional and reliable software.

Fact #2
Software engineers are involved in various stages of the software development lifecycle, including requirements gathering, system design, implementation, deployment, and maintenance. They collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure the smooth and successful completion of the project.

Fact #3
The need for software engineers is constantly growing. Technology continues to evolve, and industries around the world rely heavily on software systems for their operations, creating a high demand for skilled software engineers. Software engineers are not limited to the technology industry. They are in demand in a variety of sectors including finance, healthcare, gaming, transportation and more. Virtually every industry that relies on software systems needs the expertise of software engineers.

Fact #4
Software engineers are problem solvers at heart. They enjoy tackling complex challenges and finding elegant solutions. They analyze problems, break them down into smaller components, and apply their technical expertise to develop effective software solutions.

Fact #5
Continuous learning is a fundamental aspect of being a software engineer. With technology evolving rapidly, software engineers must stay updated with the latest programming languages, frameworks, and tools to remain competitive and deliver high-quality software solutions.

Fact #6
Collaboration and teamwork are essential for software engineers. They often work in teams, collaborating with other engineers, designers, product managers, and stakeholders to develop software solutions that meet the needs of end-users.

Fact #7
Software engineers value clean and maintainable code. They follow best practices, use design patterns, and write code that is easy to understand, modify, and extend. They also adhere to coding standards and employ version control systems to manage code changes effectively.

Fact #8
Software engineers contribute to open-source projects. They actively participate in the open-source community by sharing their knowledge, contributing to existing projects, and creating new software tools that are freely available to the public.

Fact #9
Software engineers prioritize software testing and quality assurance. They write unit tests, perform integration testing, and conduct system testing to identify and fix bugs, ensuring that the software functions as intended and meets the desired specifications.

Fact #10
Software engineers often specialize in specific domains or technologies. Some focus on mobile app development, others on web development, machine learning, data science, or cybersecurity. This specialization allows them to deepen their expertise and tackle unique challenges in their chosen area.

If you’re interested in a career with .NET, be sure to check out the opportunities here.

The use of video calling apps has grown over the past few years, especially during the pandemic when telecommuting became a mainstream model and communication between people became online.

The company intends to extend the beta to Android developers later this year.

Interested developers, regardless of size, can sign up for the beta through T-Mobile’s DevEdge developer platform. Developers in the Seattle area will have the added benefit of joining T-Mobile engineers at the 5G Hub to test and validate this cutting-edge capability in their applications.

T-Mobile plans to expand network coverage to 300 million people by the end of the year.

The Nardò Technical Center (NTC) currently has more than 20 test tracks and facilities on more than 700 hectares (7,000 acres) of land in Puglia, Italy, with about 185 people helping to offer state-of-the-art engineering services at the NTC, including vehicle testing for more than 90 automotive OEMs worldwide.

Antonio Gratis, managing director at NTC, says the new division will focus specifically on developing highly automated driving functions, vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, and connectivity solutions.

The new office will open in the city of Leece, where a 5G network was recently established. Porsche expects the area to provide a rich talent pool of IT engineers, software architects, developers, and computer science graduates to pull from.

When selecting FinTech software, firms weigh a variety of factors including cost, scalability, potential for APIs, consistently high performance, compliance, security, and time to market. But the programming languages used most significantly influence these factors. Like anything else, programming languages have their advantages and disadvantages. Some of them improve performance, adaptability and security.

Today we’ve chosen to introduce you to key programming languages needed in the FinTech sector according to Analytics Insights.

Key Programming Languages in FinTech

Java
Being a well-known language with an extensive library of third-party components, Java is used in many Fintech systems because it facilitates the creation of complex Fintech software.

Python
Given that Python is among the most widely used programming languages, it is not surprising that it has had a dramatic impact on the Fintech sector. According to PyPI’s analysis of Google searches, Python is the most widely used programming language in the world.

Golang
Golang, commonly known as Go, is an open source programming language created by Google in 2009. It is quickly displacing other programming languages among fintech companies that need to launch soon and have a clear, scalable, and simple backend.

Ruby
Did you know that many startups in the digital finance sector use Ruby in combination with the Ruby on Rails framework for its productivity and ease of use? Some major reasons why developers prefer it are the security protections built into the framework and the simplicity of the language that saves time and money.

Scala
High-end distributed software systems used in financial products often process large amounts of data. Because it’s so productive and helps engineers shorten their source code, Scala is an excellent choice for processing them. There are at least two or three departures from Java. Additionally, the most popular Big Data frameworks that are vital to the FinTech sector have been developed using Scala.

Emilian Abadjiev, founder of Tumba Solutions

“Digital technologies hold the power to redefine the architecture of our cities. They serve as essential tools in our quest for sustainable, efficient, and inclusive urban development. By intelligently integrating technologies like 3D, VR, AI, and Web5, we can sculpt smarter cities that offer a higher quality of life while remaining respectful of our planet’s resources. Our goal isn’t merely to keep pace with digital trends, but to proactively leverage these tools to create healthier, safer, and more beneficial environments for all urban residents,”

Emo Abadjiev explained.

WeRide.Today is not just a cutting-edge app, but part of an innovative platform devoted to responsible and human-centric solutions. Designed to assist bike commuters in navigating the often challenging cityscape, it provides more than just personal navigation; it offers contextual hints and showcases helpful Points of Interest (POIs) that simplify urban commuting. Grounded in democratic and open principles, WeRide.Today fosters sustainable active urban mobility, going beyond an app to embody comprehensive technological solutions for a greener, more connected today and future.

In addition to this, Abadjiev will shed light on the revolutionary Digital City project. An ambitious venture that epitomizes his commitment to redefining urban planning for the digital age. The project is poised to reshape how we conceive urban landscapes, integrating emergent technologies like 3D, VR, AI, and Web5 to deliver an unmatched urban living experience.

Through his participation in the Green Transition conference, Abadjiev aims to underline the possibilities of merging advanced technology with real-world applications, reinforcing his belief that these are not merely trends, but powerful tools that can help individuals, businesses, policy makers, and state administrations build groundbreaking products that enhance healthier, safer lives, and maximize technology benefits.

For additional details about the conference, please visit the official Green Transition website and join the “Digitization and Cybersecurity” panel.