Few days back I attended a conference on "Verification Futures". It was primarily for hardware verification engineers. There were speakers from major EDA vendors like Synopsys, Mentor and Cadence. They talked about current challenges faced by verification engineers and innovations happening in the industry.
A key trend which is observed, is change of focus from design oriented VIPs to verification oriented VIPs which means if anything cannot be tested and then it should not be designed which is very true in software industry also.
As in software industry, focus is moving from first develop and then test to first write test and then develop code for it i.e. TDD (Test Driven Development). As complexity of the softwares is increasing day by day so proper testing of the software is becoming very-very important and now both clients and senior management have realized the importance of testing and hence are more concerned about proper and thorough testing and testing artifacts. Now a days, testers are not just black box tester they dig into code to find probable issues and suggest solutions. Instead of performing only random testing, they are now more systematic and focused, they use both scientific methods as well as their experience. They are expected to have more technical as well as domain knowledge.
In essence now a tester is no more considered as someone who blocks the release of the product but as one who is integral part of the team and who provides confidence in the product.
