We are Testers

I love the software industry! I love it's energy, I love a challenge, I love learning new things, I love the fast pace of change. The one thing that has always irritated me though, and the one thing that causes me despair, is the perception of the test role in our software life-cycle. Whilst our practices and processes have moved away from the old waterfall methodology, the way we view test hasn't! Let me try and explain what I mean. In the waterfall world development managers managed teams of developers who wrote code which turned into a product. Once that was done, it was thrown over to the test team, managed by a test manager. The product was undoubtedly late coming from development, which meant testing was squeezed and more test resource (predominantly manual) was thrown at it in the flawed reasoning that more resource = less time. What's wrong with that you may ask? sounds perfectly reasonable! - No. Despite the fact the assumption is ultimately flawed, more resource doesn't necessarily mean less time and certainly doesn't mean better quality. But those flawed assumptions are not my biggest problem with this approach, it is the de-humanisation of the tester and the devaluation of the test role that really bothers me here. By randomly tossing around test resource they are basically saying it is a generic role where anyone can do any task, reducing the role to mindless task execution rather than the skilled role it can be! I think this not only devalues the role, but ultimately de-creases the quality of the end product. What you don't see a great deal of in the industry is the 'loaning' of developer resource to random teams that might be falling behind on their development, (it does happen, but tends to be localised and playing to the skill-set of the developer in question), why should test be any different. The tidal wave of movement towards the Agile process has created integrated development teams where a team has representation from all disciplines. Yet we still see the siloing of test, (when companies or teams say they are doing Agile, they usually mean they are doing a form of Agile - the things that usually gets left in the old world is test). I have seen this my whole testing career, it happens in IBM, but IBM isn't the odd one out - interestingly the companies that are seen to produce good, quality software, (Google, Netflix, and yes, Microsoft) are the companies that treat test with the respect it deserves. Testers are well trained, qualified and often specialist individuals, not keyboard monkey's! I long for the day in which this is fully recognised in our industry. When it does and when we finally correctly resource the test role in our teams and companies we will start to see a vast improvement in the quality of the products we produce.