Member-only story
DITs (Developer in Test) and SDETs (Software Development Engineer in Test) are pretty much the same role but i personally prefer to distinguish them separately simply because i have seen those roles used different in my past companies.
I want to encourage the usage of SDETs more than DITs because i believe the SDET model works well within modern Agile Software Development.
DITs are really Test Automation Engineers. Their prime responsibility is to write test automation code to automate the testing of a software application. This is fine and certainly i believe DITs have their place in this industry. However, i have seen a lot that since DITs are Test Automation Engineers and that they are performing test automation work; they have become very siloed from within the software development team itself.
For example, within a typical agile software development team you might have of course Developers, manual QA/Testers, Business Analysts, Software Architects, Product Owners, and finally you decide that you require to do test automation so you hire a DIT or a Test Automation Engineer for that specific role within the team.
In some places i have seen that the manual QA/Tester performing that role too as they want to get into the area of test automation.
Whilst this model works, it is not that super efficient. With people in their defined roles, it is very tempting to restrict certain pieces of work to those specific roles. That is; Product Owners define…
