SDET - missing the point since the 1990s
A term that I still hear occasionally is "SDET", or "Software Development Engineer in Test". It is also known by a few other terms - Developer in Test, Test Automation Engineer and so on. Essentially it is a job role for a developer whose main responsibilities are to write automated tests and frameworks to check software. And it is a truly awful case of missing the point completely . It is a job title that indicates a fundamental systemic problem in an organisation. First, some history. Back in the Bad Old Days of the 1900s, we used to develop software using a linear waterfall style process, mostly due to a bizarre and tragic misunderstanding of a single academic paper (Royce, 1970). There was a lot of management thinking that modelled software development as a factory production line, and assumed that there were cost reductions from specialisms - someone creates a software design, someone builds that design, and someone tests what has been written. At the end, som...