To be honest, the trend is the same across the industry, even here in the US, especially for testing web applications everyone wants Selenium or similar experience. Two reasons that I figure this is the case:
1) Selenium is free and the current global economy is all about doing the most with less capital. Especially with smaller companies.
2) The industry is more and more heading into the web and the cloud for their software solutions and companies are looking for a "Web testing tool". TestComplete does web testing but it is not an exclusively web testing tool so any searching will come up with Selenium.
As has been said, the move to web based service has pushed a lot of testing Selenium's way.
It's also free, has multiple language bindings, and has actually been adopted recently as a W3C standard. Which are all big factors in it's uptake I suspect.
In my office, I was initially doing both web and desktop testing, now I focus almost entirely on desktop. The web based stuff is now done using fixtures written by the devs, and scripts written by the testers.
To be honest, I wouldn't worry too much about adverts mentioning the specific tool. I'd never used TC before I started here 4 years ago. Indeed, I'd never heard of it either. My background was QTPro. But my current employer asked me to look at tools and select one I thought was best fit for them. TestComplete was it. Handles more technologies out of the box. Offers multiple scripting languages. And is a lot cheaper then QTPro (probably TC's closest competitor - I think so anyway).
Both have their plus and minus points. But having used TC for a few years now, I do prefer it over QTPro. (Or whatever QTPro is called now. I know HP renamed it a while ago.)
So just the fact that you know automation is the main thing. The concepts are the same in most. But the execution varies. And if you're familiar with the concepts, learning new ways to execute them is a lot easier than starting from scratch ....
What Colin_McCrae said. :-)
The best way to look at it is that, from testing tool to testing tool, the general concepts of test automation stay the same. Code languages are also fairly universal (both QTP/UFT and TestComplete support VBScript) and the general ideas of object identification and so on are also universal (object repositories, POM, NameMapping, etc). So, if you are job hunting looking for a position as a test automation person, that's your sell points: you know test automation, you know multiple languages, you know automation concepts and processes, etc. True, companies are still looking at "ramp up" cost for training someone in a new tool. But if you can show yourself to be a rapid learning, able to pick things up quickly, etc., that ramp up time can be minimized as well.
Colin_McCrae I've worked both with HP's UFT (Unified Functional Testing - the new name they made out of QTP), as well as with IBM's Rational Functional tester, as well as SmartBear's TestComplete.
All provide solid bases for designing future proof, robust , data driven end-to-end test automation frameworks, and they differ (somewhat ;) in pricing regarding the license.
That said, I agree the concept regarding above tools are more or less the same.
I think Selenium has quite a different approach in the sense that it solely relies on scripting and requires much more effort to realize effective end-to-end validations.
And yet there is an economic pressure on the bottom line. While your points are valid when it comes to what makes good testing and good tools, unfortunately, many of the folks making the decisions on tool purchasing are not the ones who need to use them but are the ones who need to report to the shareholders as to how they are keeping costs low while maintaining a profit margin. And Selenium, effectively, does that from that narrow viewpoint.
Get a good tester with coding background in a shop that uses Selenium and it will SHINE like you wouldn't believe. If, however, you try and grab a good tester who excels at manual testing processes but cannot code themselves out of a wet paper bag... then you'll tank pretty quickly. This is why shops who are looking for Selenium test automators typically do not hire "pure testers"... someone who is a good tester AND a good test automator is a rarity... a rarity that, somehow, it seems that the SmartBear community has blown up the average on... lots of BOTH here.
tristaanogre So, basically, what you suggest that, looking at the market demands, all 'pure testers' should learn Selenium (if they want to become populair for businesses, get invited for job interviews, etc? And leave all the commercial tools (HP UFT, IBM Rational, TestComplete, Tosca, Telerik, etc) for what it is, because future will be Selenium?
