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Judging by the Google trends on "Test Automation", for the past 5 years the majority of interest in test automation was coming from locations like India and Sri Lanka. And, if you would look for Selenium trends as well, you would notice that India is more than twice more interested in it than any other country.

What are the reasons these particular regions are vastly ahead of any other country when it comes to test automation popularity? Is it because testing and test automation have more tendencies to be outsourced than the other parts of the development cycle?

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  • This is not unexpected, India is rapidly approaching 1/5th the total population of the planet. Mark Smith.
    – Sperk
    Commented Nov 30, 2017 at 8:51
  • I was thinking about this excellent question, and about the types of questions we are getting here from above mentioned regions. Here in "Western world" you expect to have equal opportunity as your peers, and you play fair, work hard, learn stuff to succeed.
    – Peter M. - stands for Monica
    Commented Dec 1, 2017 at 17:30
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    From the questions we are getting, in those areas many people are looking for shortcuts which allow them to succeed without putting in all that hard work, and don't like to reminded that there are no shortcuts, and learning the basics is required to succeed in more advanced stuff. Not all questions are like that, but enough are to notice the trend. Of course it is a generalization, obvious disclaimers. Just idle musing.
    – Peter M. - stands for Monica
    Commented Dec 1, 2017 at 17:30

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No matter what the term is, there are several factors going into the relative popularity of a search term, particularly something like test automation or selenium.

  • How active the job market is in that area vs other areas.
  • How international the job market is for that particular aspect of software testing.
  • How tempting the area is for outsourcing by multinational organizations for that aspect of software testing.
  • How test automation as a job compares to other jobs in the area - if it's a prestige employment option in an area it's going to be more popular.

India - and to an extent Sri Lanka - has an active technology market, a growing economy, low costs to multinational organizations relative to their likely base regions (Europe and North America mostly), and the last I heard test automation was a relatively prestigious career option (that is, considered highly skilled and well paid) in that area.

Those factors are going to make test automation a more popular search option in India than it is in somewhere that doesn't have all these factors.

The fact that when I checked New Zealand is in the top 5 suggests that the trends are using a per-capita measurement so that India's population isn't overwhelming other data.

So the really short version? It depends.

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I wouldn't conclude that because there seems a lot of interest in certain countries that therefore they are ahead in the field itself. Looking at the quality of many questions on automation here and elsewhere also gives the impression people in certain areas are busy, or starting, with the subject.

In some cases, that I know of, the idea that automation is better and thus cheaper drives companies into that direction. Based on the assumption that a lot of outsourcing is done to those countries you could argue that that might be the reason there is more interest in automation. But to be honest: I have no hard data to substantiate that....

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  • I was thinking about this excellent question, and about the types of questions we are getting here from above mentioned regions. Here in "Western world" you expect to have equal opportunity as your peers, and you play fair, work hard, learn stuff to succeed.
    – Peter M. - stands for Monica
    Commented Dec 1, 2017 at 17:27
  • From the questions we are getting, in those areas many people are looking for shortcuts which allow them to succeed without putting in all that hard work, and don't like to reminded that there are no shortcuts, and learning the basics is required to succeed in more advanced stuff. Not all questions are like that, but enough are to notice the trend. Of course it is a generalization, obvious disclaimers. Just idle musing.
    – Peter M. - stands for Monica
    Commented Dec 1, 2017 at 17:28
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One of the answers here already covered India. I would like to add another region here. The North Indian IT Hub . Pune in Maharashtra.

The Testing Trend:

Pune has an abundant of IT and Manufacturing Companies . Speaking for IT services company, Testing tools like "Selenium" , "Appium", "Cucumber" and very much in demand.

Test Scripting languages:

The favorite is Python . Everybody wants to work with it . There are a lot Automation tools supporting Python nowadays like selenium , Squish. Python jobs are coming up everyday in heaps.

Statistically speaking , Javascript is still the king. A simple statistical study from jobs that tag skills , proves this.

Manufacturing Industries:

With the advent of embedded devices, even industries want good testers and Pune has got a lot of brands that demand good testing candidates. And the skills they are looking for are :

Python , Device Protocols like CAN , Profibus. Testing modules like unittest, Pytest (For python).

Banks:

Banks are the best package providers for the right candidate. A fitting tester needs to be a mix of a lot of skills (Jack of many). A few are:

SQL, Python , Java, ORACLE, PL-SQL, and DEVOPS tools.

It's cut throat competition. No one needs a master of all here.

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From there if you switch to test automation trends in India, you will see 1st and 2nd places respectively Karnataka -> Bangalore and Telangana -> Hyderabad both are popular IT hubs of India. So the thing is that in India the number of IT graduates or wanna be IT people are more out of them there are

  • People who want to get job on software testing and they want to add automation as their added advantage to land in a job
  • People who want to get a job as software Developer and they want to add automation as their added advantage because here many start-ups to level-3 companies expect the same resource to develop and test( or don't need to test).

And many more people want to learn software test automation for several reasons like kickstart IT career or add additional skill etc.. I remember one day I am switching tv channels suddenly one swamiji who is giving answers to bhakts on various questions on a TV show on phone line, on caller's question that when he will get job as per astrology readings and horoscope, swamiji told that caller to learn selenium so that he will get a job as he done his bachelor's in technology and not getting any job.

That is the craze test automation have got in recent years in India.

So for all of them one good resource to learn test automation is Internet through Google. And in India, there is the 4G star "JIO" which provided Free data plans for first 6 months after launch (sep 2016) and cheapest plans after that, which made every other operator to drop their prices to 1/4th of previous prices. Even broadband connections become cheap over the years.

Even so much of content developed by experts and made them available over internet so that they will get some more money

Factors like these brought the popularity to test automation

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  • Interesting anecdote. Please explain what is "swamiji" and "bhakt". I already know that in India "fresher" means junior/entry level position, "fresh from a college" I assume.
    – Peter M. - stands for Monica
    Commented Nov 30, 2017 at 18:35
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I think that we have to be very careful in taking this data because as specified in the documentation when you select terms it does not consider "misspellings, spelling variations, synonyms, plural or singular versions" or translation in other languages.

If you compare for example "unit testing" as terms , with "unit testing" as topic ... the result are totally different.

with terms the first 5 country are "most english language" (Sri Lanka, India, Nepal, Singapore, Ireland)

with Topic : (China, Estonia, Denmark, Israel, Ireland)

Curiosity "Ireland" is the only one included in both cases

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