1) Short answer is I want to be a solution architect in next few years. I believe that working on testing framework makes me learn more about software quality and gives me a whole picture about system. Like how the system works? how to make it more efficient? How to refactor a module or redesign the system?
2) I have worked on many projects. The testing strategies are varies a lot. There are two aspects: developer testing and QA testing.
* Some teams have no requirement on unit testing or very little. Like no code coverage requirement. So no integration testing or any other testing. Developers only need to do some spot check.
* Some teams' guidance is testing is not required. They only do the testing when they have capacity. All debugging working are based the system knowledge. So product quality is very low.
* QA: Some QAs have no CS background and only do manual testing. Or some business analysts work together with Developers as QA. Sometimes, QA has in-house test tools. They just need to prepare the test data. The work is tedious and the tool is clunky.
* In the past few years, in order to delivery high quality product, I have spent lots of time in studying testing. Like jUnit, Mocktio, Spring testing suite, Java Assured, Selenium, H2-Flyway in memory db testing.