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Respect for testing/testers is something that has come up in conversations a lot – testing has often been described as a “necessary evil” but maybe that’s gradually changing and testing is getting the respect it deserves?
How do you feel about it? Has there been a change or is testing still seen as being somehow “less important” than development?
I just think testing is becoming more and more important. The systems have reached a high level of complexity and for sure developers don’t have the time and patience to check on all dependencies.
Just to give you a simple example: Windows phones vs. Android phones. If one ‘played’ a little bit with a Windows phone could have noticed that the system is absolutely superb: it looks and feels great. But unfortunately the apps are not very well integrated with one another (not like in Android at least).
The poor integration may be due to poor QA.On the long term, this is like a life sentence for Window phones.
Hi Paul,
I think one of the reasons for considering testing less important than development is related to its age and use within the software industry. Testing is considered something new compared to development and it has started to be seen as an independent area/activity in the software domain later than development.
I see that things are changing and it has started to change because the systems are continuously growing and testing is more and more important. I cannot say exactly how is the relationship between dev and test in terms of importance, but for sure QA plays an important role in the software industry today. Managers realize that it is better to invest more in QA for delivering high quality products rather than loosing customers and therefore money. There is a large competition between companies and testing should be always involved in the software industry.
Regards,
AlinHi Paul,
It depends on the context and person: some developers agree while others don’t.
Regards,
Alinmost developers I worked with agreed (some from the very beginning, others at a later stage) that testing brought value value to the product
They see value in testing but sometimes not in tester. “Anyone can do it” (testing) is the psychology behind this. As a tester we should also be smart enough as well. If you really bring some valuable inputs and help them solving their problem, they respect and see value both in tester and testing.
I was lucky enough to work with a dev who described testers as his “guardian angels preventing him releasing evil into the world”. Unfortunately there are still devs who believe they could test better than us, who tell us we’re being too picky, can’t take advice on usability etc. Less than there used to be but when I see job ads for test and dev positions at the same experience levels in a company and the test job is being offered at maybe 2/3 the salary of the dev job it’s hard to see that the company values testing. Testers are expected to find all the problems (we all know that’s just not possible) but salaries don’t reflect that responsibility in a lot of companies. Also if a team consists of test, devs, analyst and author it’s very rare that the test or author will be the team lead even if they’re the most experienced members of the team.
Generally speaking it seems that more developers are seeing the value in what testers do.
“guardian angels preventing him releasing evil into the world”
Testers as guardian angels but not team leaders. I wonder is it common for testers not to be team leads as Christina mentioned?
Hi, I work as software tester in a service company for the oil industry. In our community and development centers, software testing is becoming one of the key areas for the quality of the products with direct impact in business revenue. Having a software tester with the respective domain knowledge and testing skills have proved to be critical to the success of the quality assurance of the product.
Developers and Portfolio teams in our company are more and more willing (and even keen) to have the appropriate software testing team for the products, and the continuous communication and feedback have proved to contribute to the final quality of the product and the happiness of the end user clients.
So I would say, testing, in the world of software products dedicated to the oil industry is one of the critical needs in the software development process to satisfy (and even exceed) the needs of our clients (Oil Operator Companies).Regards.
Testing proves its value by finding issues which are quite bad if they make it to production release.
I never heard that big companies like Microsoft or Google neglect testers — people working for that big companies even write books to school more testers and show some ways to improve testing.
It is true, there are companies which don’t value testing very much, but I never heard about a project which neglected testing and fared well enough.I believe that testing has gained respect in recent times.
I had recently come across a developer who said what you do is just “Perform similar tests for any application that does not require any skill”. But that is the only bad opinion I have heard about testers.
I have worked on many other projects where testers and developers are part of a team that work together and get equal respect.
I think it really helps to sit together in the same office area, testers and developers. In my current assignment both testers and developers do testing at the end of the sprint, and the testers run tests on integration items during the sprint.
How do you feel about it? Has there been a change or is testing still seen as being somehow “less important” than development?
Discussion is too large for just a post on a forum..we can talk about it for hours.
Testing is seen as less important than development. That’s why to compensate with that testers need now to have a million skills (probably 2-4 times more than a dev).
If you ask a dev about what he did new in a year..well..he’ll probably tell you about a new java version and 2-3 libraries he’s using.
If you ask a tester about the same thing..he’ll tell you that he learned 12 more tools, one or two new programming languages, one certification, and some training in..maybe project management or agile or business analysis..
It’s definitely a longer discussion – it would be interesting to hear the views of non-testers. Have their attitudes to testers changed over time?
Has anyone seen such a change in perception from devs?
In Ireland most companies do not know enough about testing or testers. I’ve seen first had whereby in consultancy a testers role is filled by anyone they have on the bench with some IT background. I have also seen a tester hired from a recruitment agency with no knowledge of testing, software development or IT because they said he should be able to execute the test cases for you.
More so management and developers teams have too much of an input into testing. I don’t believe there is trust testers to do a performance. This leads to huge levels of documents like Master Test plans, Test strategy doc, Test plan for phases and Test cases. All of these can be managed much more efficiently.
I would also say there are a lot of bad testers floating around the industry in Ireland. They keep getting contracts here and there. This all because companies and recruiters don’t ask the right questions in interviews. It is too easy for them to talk about how they will create the test plan and test cases and throw buzz words in but then they don’t really have the knowledge or skills to perform testing.
In Ireland I think it is slowly getting better but along way to go compared to other countries.
I have come across a few dev’s who have a great attitude towards testers.
I have found the developer respect for testers is not constant from region to region, even within a single country. When I moved companies and from one big city to another, I found that the respect changed. The large tech city I came from understood what testers did and what their worth was. The city I moved to had a large development startup mindset, but not any respect for testers.
I was brought in to build a small team to catch-up with the pace the development team was already going. I quickly understood the view point of the city. The testers that applied were not suited to testing, and in my opinion were a bit more than button pushers. It took me a while, but I found the team and brought them on board. When they walked in, able to keep up with the developers speaking pseudo code, and then catching up and waiting on the developers to fix and move forward, we had their attention. When the CTO demanded we crunch a full 6 weeks of regression into 1.5 weeks, I told him the only way that could happen would be to give me all the developers. Hesitantly and with some negotiation in time allotment he did. Most of the developers tested simple to follow test cases, which allowed the regular testers to answer the developer’s test questions and go deeper into exploratory testing. The reaction from the developers went from “WOW! You guys get to do this? This is fun!” to “WHEN WILL IT END!!”, I even heard a few exclaim “How did you think to do this?”, but it was all in realization what testers do. In the end they had respect for what we did, and were more attentive to issues as they came up to fix them quickly before the issues caused additional issues. Our bug count dropped and the testers had a stronger voice at the table.
I know that all of those developers have a greater knowledge and respect for testers and we had some that already did. Most of the developers realized that we may not know every line of code or every algorithm used, but we have to understand how the product was made, how the customer is expected to use it, how the product could be used by the customer, how to attack the security of the product, report it all so that it can be fixed, and a number of other things.
Most of the developers I worked with at that company knew that the QA team doesn’t get the positive recognition in front of the customer, the developer does – and the developers began to realize that we make them look good.
I’ve heard of some companies bringing in all Developers through the QA group for at least 1 year before having them code on any project to help them get a better understanding and respect for the QA side.
With a majority of the focus on Developer’s perception of QA Testers, I’m leaving it here. The discussion can go on for many long pages when bringing in management and other areas within a tech company.
I am working as a software tester in my company. In future we are planing to buy automation tool. really good scope for testing.
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