How essential are your testers?
A question I don’t seem to be able to let go of is: where does a tester fit into a software development team? More specifically, how essential are testers to the team?
I think that there are basically three options:
- Your testers do not add something essential.
- It’s not clear if your testers add something essential.
- Your testers do add something essential.
Your testers do not add something essential
I suspect this is becoming more and more common. Thanks to Agile, CI/CD, DevOps, improved tooling and changing expectations, you should not have testers that find the dumb bugs I was expected to find at the start of my career. If a programmer wrote a >
where it should have been a >=
, we should expect a unit test and not a tester to catch it.