When Testers Lead

When Testers Lead

Usually and during the lifetime of any software development project, programmers do take the lead and control almost all project activities. They keep their focus and goal to finish the tasks especially writing the code in addition to to get it running. Programmers are always in a rush especially when they follow Agile methodology. This rush causes them to ignore testing of their code including both unit testing and integration testing. Also and once you ask programmers about testing or why they ignore testing then you will find out that they consider testing  as a destructive activity and will waste their time. In addition, programmers do believe that testing team should find all the issues in the software including issues with the code. Unfortunately, not only programmers think like that. You may find some senior employees or even those in management level who share the same thoughts. However, what if the opposite thing happens? What if testing team takes the lead?

One testing goal is to find issues before releasing software to customer. When testing team takes the lead and keeps this goal mind, quality will be built in in the software rather than integrating it later. In other terms, quality will be baked in. Of course there should be collaboration between testing team and all project team members. Otherwise, you cannot clap with only one hand and therefore you cannot achieve quality. In addition, building the quality in the product will help to reduce time, money and effort to find and fix issues before releasing the software to customer and hence will reduce or accelerate the time to market. I am very sure that this is what programmers and management are looking for.

All the best…

4 Comments

Leif Bälter

about 10 years ago

Anwar. About your first sentence " Usually and during the lifetime of any software development project, programmers do take the lead and control almost all project activities " My first reaction was. Poor Anwar. I feel sorry for him and the terrible years of experience he has. He can not make a generalization of all projects like this. This is not my experience. My experience is not that testers should take the lead. The whole project, Project Manager or Scrum Manager including all testers and programmers and Product Qwner should agree on the goal, the risks and priority based upon the risk. Never we and them. Just we.

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Anwar Bosbool

about 10 years ago

Thanks Leif for sharing your experience. The situation differs from one organization to another. What I mentioned in the post is a case that might happen in any organization.

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Mohamed shalash

about 10 years ago

where is the answer of : When Testers Lead??

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Anwar Bosbool

about 10 years ago

Mohamed: the title was not a question. In addition, the second paragraph talks about what happens when testers lead. Thanks a lot.

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