Tips for a lone tester

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  • Author
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  • #18033
    Jesper
    Participant
    @jesper-lindholt-ottosen

    Hi

    What tips do you have for the lone tester in a company of many developers?

    Perhaps when they want to grow to more people see

    Growing a Company Test Community: Roles and Paths for Testers

     

    #18105
    Ronan Healy
    Keymaster
    @ronan

    That is a great place to start. I’m sure it depends on the context and the type of testing that they are doing but being a lone tester does mean a lot of responsibility for the tester.

    I wonder does it make it harder to work with developers and business analysts being just one person rather than a team?

    #18106
    Maurice
    Participant
    @msiteur

    Become a developer too.
    In the sense that they do not see as a tester, but being part of the team. Nice guy to talk with etc. And by the way, he finds he things/defects we miss.

    #18107
    Sara
    Participant
    @chalmers-sara

    Hi.

    I´ve been there, the way to survive and thrive is to team up with the developers and show them the benefit of having you on their side. Search their advice, include them.

    Good luck.

    #18108
    Lars
    Participant
    @larshummelmose

    Educate them in the basic test techniques (Equivalence Partitioning, Boundary Value Analysis, Pairwise testing, ….)

    Educate them in the difference between a negative test (incomplete/falsy input data and we expect the system to return an error message) and positive test(input is valid and we expect a nice answer)

    Educate them in the basic difference between functional and non functional requirements and the different tests to cover that

    If in an Agile/SAFe setting let them know the qualities the https://blogs.agilefaqs.com/2011/02/01/inverting-the-testing-pyramid/ (actually a simple viable statement that covers everything since we first started to write code in units/module/integrated systems)

    Make sure to let them understand the different mindset – Developer want to demonstrate thing work – and well tester like to break stuff ….

    and we as teammeambers need to make sure we bend toward each other – making it a combined team responsability to make only the code that is needed and ensure it full fills the end users requirement …

    #18117
    Magnus
    Participant
    @mange-pettersson

    I find that promoting the idea that quality is a team sport and that everyone needs to think in the term of quality and testing on some level is a very good way to start. I’m a solo tester at my company with ~11 devs and they have all adopted some kind of responsibility for quality, which becomes very clear when other external teams join in on projects.

    #18118
    Alin
    Participant
    @groza-alin88

    If there is only one tester in the team, I think it is a good idea to convince the team that all team members (developers, testers, architects, managers, analysts etc.) have the same goal: to deliver quality products. So, testers are working together with all team members and not against them. An effective way is to consider the project team as a football team; each player has a different role (goalkeeper, midfielder, striker etc.) but in the end, they have a common goal: to win the game.

    Another approach for the tester, if possible, is to try having not only testing related tasks, but also tasks related to dev or ops.

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