A Look at the Relationship Between Testers and Developers

I believe that one of the important things in the work life of a tester is to have a good working relationship with developers. This will not only make a tester's job and bug advocacy process easier but will also give him the ability to exert influence on quality, promote positive collaboration and learning opportunities.

Roy Osherove interviewed James Bach on “The Role of the Tester” where Bach talks about this. He says that:

‘…developers are the people who create quality; they make the quality happen. Without the developers, nothing would be there; you’d have zero quality.’

After all without developers on the project us – testers – will not have a job!

In the last few years I have worked thoroughly integrated into Agile development teams as a lone tester. I tend to gravitate more towards developers as opposed to testers as I feel that it helps me expand my domain knowledge and technical skills and…be a better tester. Plus programmers are WYSIWYG. I prefer it when people do not beat around the bush when working together.

On occasion I hear and read stories about the challenges and conflicts both sides have experienced in the workplace, as well as tips and recommendations on how to handle difficult situations and work on improvements from the tester’s viewpoint.

I thought it would be interesting to find out from developers what they thought about testers and their skills. I conducted a very unscientific survey of some developers that I have worked with and whom I also consider professional mentors and good friends.

The replies were pretty refreshing. I hope testers find them useful and take them into consideration in how they go about their work.

Here are the results:

How I Became a Tester

Last month I was asked to conduct an online webinar on how I became a mobile tester. It didn’t work out because of my crazy work schedule and miscommunication with the event organizers.  However I had an opportunity to work on my topic with James Bach. I got some helpful guidance, questions and tips from him and then decided to turn the content into a blog post.

I want to mention that James is probably the toughest mentor that I have trained with. But he is also the most approachable, sincere, committed, consistent teacher, in addition to being extremely smart and helpful. I came to him originally without any formal testing background or training. I feel I am a better tester since I started training with him and the fact that he is just a Skype away gives me a lot of confidence when I come across difficult situations in my professional endeavors. I have met many other role models and mentors in our global testing community but imho there is no one like him and I am grateful that I found him.

How did you get into testing? Why did testing attract you?

What initially attracted me to testing was the never-ending process of puzzle solving. I enjoy the creativity involved when you have to come up with a scheme of different ideas and approaches to dig into a program and find what’s broken or what may potentially cause a problem.

Had a Blast at CAST 2011

CAST 2011 is over. I am still digesting the impressions and events of the last 3 days. I feel both intoxicated from all the information and energy I consumed as well as inspired and giddy. This was my first CAST. As a n00b I had the advantage of experiencing and feeling things more acutely than someone who has already attended a similar event or two like this before.

Questing in Boston

I received a 'QUEST 2011: Thank You Letter' from QAI Global Institute yesterday that was emailed to the participants list. I meant to post a blog about the conference when I came back on April 8 but got carried away with my busy work routine and getting ready for a release. This email brought back good memories and I thought I would share a few sentiments here.

This was my first testing conference and I did not know what to expect. Granted I have been to quite a few international conferences when I worked as an interpreter but those were on oil and gas, US-Russia business relations, auto shows and international law. My responsibility was to help people communicate, negotiate, resolve conflicts and build relationships. 

There were days when I would not have time to eat. Meals were provided of course, followed by scrumptious desert, but I was not able to eat as I was busy talking, or rather people talking with each other but through me. People tend to be more relaxed, personal and prone to heart to heart conversations when they share food. If you add alcohol into this equation then the conversions would get more colorful and run longer. I even had lunch with the Honorable Judges Scalia and Ginsburg and my clients. They were enjoying an amazing lunch and interesting conversation and I was busy passing information back and forth in Russian and English.

Needless to say I never really had time to explore any of those shows as I had to follow a rigid schedule and attend workshops and receptions of the clients' choice. This time it was different. Attendees were IT professionals and mostly testers and QA folks. Of course I know that there are so many of us scattered around the US and the rest of the world but seeing SO many test/qa-obsessed people in one place was something!

I got to my first Quest day at around lunch, registered, picked up my badge and joined the gang of hungry testers. I like people-watching and while sitting by myself and observing I was able to tell the ones who were noobs like me from the ones who have either attended Quest or similar events before. They were vibrantly discussing the agendas, upcoming workshops and instructors that they knew or heard of, liked, disliked or wanted to meet. I overheard people talking about Agile, mobile testing, Jon Bach, etc. I looked through my own 'Quest at a Glance' leaflet and circled additional tutorials based one what I had heard -- just in case!

I defined my objectives and mission for the event but also kept my options open. My plan was to learn as much as possible about Agile and mobile testing, attend Janet Gregory's and Jon Bach's workshops, spend time with the uTest team and network if I was brave enough.

My first tutorial on mobile apps testing was with uTest. Needless to say I was beyond myself excited to finally meet uTesters that I got to know over the last few months through either following the uTest blog or working as a freelance tester evenings and weekends. The tutorial covered planning, mobile testing approaches and challenges as well as crowdsourcing. One of the uTesters gave a hands-on walk-through  demo of an iPad application test. It was great. Participants seemed to share my feelings. They were curious and asked many interesting questions and shared their personal stories.

The tutorial was followed by the uTest reception. Right before it I finally met Peter Shih. Peter and I corresponded via email and the uTest forum. It was so cool to finally meet him and other uTesters face to face. It felt like I have known them for quite some time. I changed my career paths and jobs a few times after I moved to the United States. Working for UUNet Technologies, SRA International and with uTest have been my best gigs by far. 

The next two days were filled with good stuff.  I attended sessions on Agile estimation and dealing with defects, Performance Testing, and Test Planning and Design. Even though the material in some classes was a bit high level and over my head I was still learning about new ideas and how people do things in different organizations.  

Another highlight of my Quest agenda was an evening cruise aboard the Spirit of Boston, sponsored by Microsoft. Boy it was fun! I never thought that testers were such party animals! I tend to get seasick even from minor waves and it was quite windy in Boston that evening. I was nervous that I might get a wicked sea sickness attack at when I least expected it. A little bit of wine and dancing seemed to have taken care of that. A couple of people break danced. How cool is that! No one seemed to mind the waves. I had a light headache the next day but that was a small price to pay considering how much fun we had.

After Thursday’s workshop on Exploratory Testing taught by Jon Bach I was proud to say that I finally met both Bach brothers. I loved Jon’s workshop. It was dynamic, entertaining and full of fun examples and brain teaser exercises. Not only have I learned about the Japan Quake Map but ever since I have been obsessed with finding those special penny coins that don’t have a Lincoln memorial displayed upside down when you flip them over.

Quest 2011 is complete. It’s time to get ready for CAST2011 in August. Again I don’t know what to expect since it will be a whole new experience and a chance to explore. One thing I know is that I will meet other Association for Software Testing members and testers who are passionate about our craft and hopefully both Bach brothers under the same roof.

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Buddhist Proverb

And he did. I met James Bach, a teacher, consultant and guru in the software testing field this week.

Here is how it happened. I am a recent involuntary Agile convert after 5-6 years of a solid waterfall testing career. In the course of the last Sprint, while continuously running exploratory tests to no end, I realized that crucial changes need to be made to my testing approaches or I would go crazy. I felt that I could not keep up with the pace of the project cycle. I tried to follow the old patterns of designing elaborate test cases based on high level user stories specs, but I was unable to as the requirements kept changing. My test cases kept getting obsolete, updating the cases slowed down my testing, and I was losing track of time and direction. Plus the whole team was under a lot of pressure. We needed to deliver a product every 3 weeks and we were at the end of the release. I felt anxious and frustrated. I blamed it on the Agile Scrum that I was forced to embrace a few months ago and on the overwhelming number of epic user stories that frequently made no sense. All of this helped move me out of my introverted comfort zone – I now had to talk to developers daily and IN PERSON.

I blamed myself most of all for not being to cope with all this better. I looked through my testing textbooks, I Googled for information on rapid and Agile testing and I read other people’s testing blogs and forums. Soon the realization hit me that what I am going through – growing pains – is not an uncommon phenomenon. Many colleagues of mine also started their quests for answers on how to better themselves and there is a growing ‘army’ of non-conformist testing professionals that consider agile, rapid testing and context-driven testing as a golden opportunity to learn, test effectively and make clients happy.

Somehow I landed on James Bach’s blog site – http://www.satisfice.com/blog/. It felt as if someone directed me right to the site. I noticed that he would be in Virginia within a week to teach his seminars on Rapid Software Testing. Wow! The timing could not have been better for me.