What do testers do? [closed]

Question

I work in a company where the developers QA the work of the other developers checking things such as adhering to coding standards through to whether it works or not.

Now this seems to work extremely well for us but I can't help feeling we are wasting development time on something a dedicated tester or testers could do.

The problem is I've always worked for this company so I have never worked with testers so don't know what function they have within a development team other than the mile high view of "they do testing".

We also tend to hire graduate level people so someone would have to guide them through all their tasks for a time.

In summary, what do testers do within your company and how do they fit into your development and release processes?

Answer 1

Their job is plain and simple. Break the application. You always know when you have a good tester, because you're always a little annoyed when that person comes around your desk/cube. The reason for this is that you know that if the tester is in your general vicinity, they've found something wrong with what you've written. All the excuses start to pile up in your mind of 'Well, you're not using it right!', etc, but in the end, you know that the tester is right, and you've just made a mistake in your programming.

Good testers can find bugs. They can think like a user, to verify the business rules, etc, but they also act like a user when they click in unusual patterns to force your application to break. It may seem like they're abusing the application and using it in a way its not meant to be used, but that's their job, and that's why they're paid as testers.

You know your tester needs to be replaced when they can't find anything wrong. Believe me, in any complex system, there's always something wrong, and it's the tester's job to find it.

That being said, it's of utmost importance to use dedicated testing people, especially when dealing with any application that has a hefty UI component.

Answer 2

Following on from David's answer, a good tester is worth his or her weight in gold - and good contract testers can be very expensive.

I worked with a superb tester some years ago. I was the tech lead at the time, and he was the bane of my life, but his worth was incalculable.

He was highly organised, and extremely intelligent. He wrote his own test plans, based on limited documentation of requirements and functions. Mostly he ran the application, and from his understanding of the business, worked out what it should do, and where it fell short.

His attention to detail was nothing short of awesome. Everything he reported was completely reproducible, documented, and came not just with error reports, but suggestions for alternate behaviour. This was hugely useful, of course, since not all bugs result in the application breaking.

He was also flexible enough to recognise where things were high priorities, and (temporarily!) stop hassling us over the things we didn't have time to do.

So we got UI feedback, bug reports, even suggestions for where the requirements had been misunderstood.

He worked me hard with what he found, but we had a strong recognition of our common goal, namely a high quality system. If you're out there, Nicholas, I wish you well.

To the OP, I'd suggest you look for someone with these skills.