Tester Impact on Quality
Does having testers around make quality worse? Maaret Pyhäjärvi has written about it very thoughtfully. She concludes that yes, “having testers makes quality worse if developers let go of testing they are doing now”.
This is an excellent point. If testing is only the testers' job, and developers stop caring about it, quality will suffer. In other words, in an environment where there is a rigid and narrow 1:1 mapping from job title to expected tasks, and where people are all too happy to pushing tasks away that sound like others' job titles, this prediction will very likely come true.
If there’s a tester on a team, their job isn’t the testing, just as a developer’s job isn’t writing code. This only makes sense at the most basic level. In a team, real strength emerges from interactions and collaboration. So does quality.
Consider a job title not as a bunch of tasks, but as a certain perspective on the work at hand. Consider a team’s work not as transactional episodes, but as continuously combining those perspectives. The developer brings the engineering perspective, the tester brings the testing perspective. Both pursue quality. Imagine a pair programming session wherein a developer and a tester work together. This scales for other roles found in teams.
Pursuing software product development properly implies that quality is a constant concern for everyone. Having testers around, then, will improve quality by virtue of taking their perspective seriously, rather than regarding them as testing service providers.
Tags: work