Data Modeling
Mathematical and Computational Data Modeling
1
Citations
8.7k
Views
40
Articles
Volume 6 Number 1 2025
RESEARCH ARTICLE (Open Access)
Understanding Employer Demand for Software Testing Professionals: A Study of Bangladesh's IT Job Market
Kamruzzaman Mithu
Data Modeling 6 (1) 1-8 https://doi.org/10.25163/data.6110878
Submitted: 10 April 2025 Revised: 01 June 2025 Accepted: 08 June 2025 Published: 10 June 2025
Abstract
Software testing has moved from a peripheral activity to a core determinant of product quality, yet little is known about what employers in developing IT markets such as Bangladesh actually expect from testing professionals. This study examines the job market for software testers in Bangladesh to characterize the education, training, experience, and skill requirements employers advertise. Guided by approaches comparable to the United States and Florea and Stray (2018, 2019) in Europe and North America, we manually reviewed 31 software testing-related job postings advertised on BDJobs, Bangladesh's leading online job portal, over November and December 2022. Postings were identified using the search terms “software tester,” “SQA engineer,” and “software quality assurance engineer,” and cross-checked against LinkedIn, Facebook, and company career pages. Each posting was coded for stated education, training, experience, testing skill, technical skill, and soft skill requirements. A bachelor's degree in computer science or engineering was required in 45.16% of postings, while 41.93% specified no formal educational requirement. Only 12.90% mentioned formal training such as ISTQB certification. Over half (54.84%) sought candidates with 0–3 years of experience. Testing skills were specified in 93.55% of postings, technical skills in 90.32%, and soft skills in 54.84%, with manual testing, database/programming proficiency, and communication skills the most commonly requested competencies. Despite a small, short-window sample, these findings offer an early empirical portrait of tester recruitment in Bangladesh and a baseline for future, larger-scale, multi-portal investigations.
Keywords: software testing; job market analysis; software quality assurance; employability skills; Bangladesh IT industry
References
Black, R. (2007). Pragmatic software testing: Becoming an effective and efficient test professional. Wiley.
Bordin, S., & De Angeli, A. (2016). Focal points for a more user-centred agile development. In H. Sharp & T. Hall (Eds.), XP 2016 (Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, Vol. 251, pp. 3–15). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33515-5_1
Capretz, L. F., Basri, S., Adili, M., & Amin, A. (2020). What Malaysian software students think about testing? In Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops (ICSEW 2020) (pp. 195–196). https://doi.org/10.1145/3387940.3392167
Cohen, C. F., Birkin, S. J., Garfield, M. J., & Webb, H. W. (2004). Managing conflict in software testing. Communications of the ACM, 47(1), 76–81.
Florea, R., & Stray, V. (2018). Software tester, we want to hire you! An analysis of the demand for soft skills (Vol. 314). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91602-6_4
Florea, R., & Stray, V. (2019). The skills that employers look for in software testers. Software Quality Journal, 27(4), 1449–1479. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-019-09462-5
Garousi, V., & Mäntylä, M. V. (2016). A systematic literature review of literature reviews in software testing. Information and Software Technology, 80, 195–216.
Halpern, D. F. (1998). Teaching critical thinking for transfer across domains: Disposition, skills, structure training, and metacognitive monitoring. American Psychologist, 53(4), 449–455.
Holtkamp, P., Jokinen, J. P., & Pawlowski, J. M. (2015). Soft competency requirements in requirements engineering, software design, implementation, and testing. Journal of Systems and Software, 101, 136–146.
Humble, J., & Farley, D. (2010). Continuous delivery: Reliable software releases through build, test, and deployment automation. Pearson Education.
Javed, A. (2012). How to improve software quality assurance in developing countries. Advanced Computing: An International Journal, 3(2), 17–28. https://doi.org/10.5121/acij.2012.3203
Joseph, D., Ang, S., Chang, R. H., & Slaughter, S. A. (2010). Practical intelligence in IT: Assessing soft skills of IT professionals. Communications of the ACM, 53(2), 149–154.
Kassab, M., Laplante, P., Defranco, J., Neto, V. V. G., & Destefanis, G. (2021). Exploring the profiles of software testing jobs in the United States. IEEE Access, 9, 68905–68916. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3077755
Kumar, S., & Hsiao, J. K. (2007). Engineers learn “soft skills the hard way”: Planting a seed of leadership in engineering classes. Leadership and Management in Engineering, 7(1), 18–23.
Kuusinen, K., Petrie, H., Fagerholm, F., & Mikkonen, T. (2016). Flow, intrinsic motivation, and developer experience in software engineering. In H. Sharp & T. Hall (Eds.), XP 2016 (Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, Vol. 251, pp. 104–117). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33515-5_9
Masuda, S. (2017). Software testing in industry and academia: A view of both sides in Japan. Proceedings of the 10th IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops (ICSTW 2017), 40–41. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSTW.2017.12
Mayer, R. E., Dyck, J. L., & Vilberg, W. (1986). Learning to program and learning to think: What’s the connection? Communications of the ACM, 29(7), 605–610.
Nurmuliani, N., Zowghi, D., & Powell, S. (2004). Analysis of requirements volatility during software development life cycle. In Proceedings of the 2004 Australian Software Engineering Conference. IEEE.
Ocholla, D., & Shongwe, M. (2013). An analysis of the library and information science (LIS) job market in South Africa. South African Journal of Libraries and Information Science, 79(1), 35–44. https://doi.org/10.7553/79-1-113
Rivera-Ibarra, J. G., Rodríguez-Jacobo, J., & Serrano-Vargas, M. A. (2010). Competency framework for software engineers. In 2010 23rd IEEE Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T). IEEE.
Storey, M.-A. D., Cubranic, D., & German, D. M. (2005). On the use of visualization to support awareness of human activities in software development: A survey and a framework. In Proceedings of the 2005 ACM Symposium on Software Visualization. ACM.
Sukhoo, A., Barnard, A., Eloff, M. M., Van der Poll, J. A., & Motah, M. (2005). Accommodating soft skills in software project management. Issues in Informing Science and Information Technology, 2, 691–703.a
Article metrics
View details
0
Downloads
0
Citations
1
Views
0
Save
Save
0
Citation
Citation
1
View
View
0
Share
Share