Joep Schuurkes (Posts about career)

If developers have autonomy, mastery and purpose, what do you need testers for?

Joep Schuurkes — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 22:00:00 GMT

At the latest FroGS conf open space, I hosted a session around the question:

If developers have autonomy, mastery and purpose, what do you need testers for?

Not because I believe that obviously in that case you don't, but I thought exploring the question would clarify the different roles a tester might have in different organizations.

After briefly sharing my own answers and my critique on the premise of the question, we had a great discussion with the group. As this post is based on the session as a whole (without claiming to cover everything that was discussed), I want to give a big thank you to everyone who participated in it.

Sidenote: for a post about a different session at the latest FroGS conf, read Elizabeth Zagroba's post "Tortured Fish Metaphors".

How do I know my testers are doing a good job?

Joep Schuurkes — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 22:00:00 GMT

If you're a manager who has testers reporting to you (or if you are a manager who has a manager who etc.), at some point you're going to ask the question: "How do I know they are doing a good job?"

Answering that question may come with a few significant challenges attached. There's a good chance you do not have a background in software testing yourself. You probably have a tool that can produce some numbers about testing with a dashboard highly recommended by its vendor. You also have plenty of other things on your plate, so whatever the solution is, it should not take up too much of your time. So how to proceed?

Before we go into that, though: this post is about telling if your testers are doing a good job with regards to testing. Testers are also team members, colleagues, employees, etc. This blog post is not about those things.

On the acceptance of GenAI

Joep Schuurkes — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 22:00:00 GMT

By using GenAI:

I accept the models were trained on stolen data.

I accept that the data was labeled by exploited workers.

I accept the environmental costs of the data centers running these models.

I accept that I am outsourcing some of my skills to a company.

I accept these companies don't have a viable business model.

I accept that I am granting more power to big tech and their vision for the world.

I accept that I am granting more power to the United States.

I accept that all this effort could have been spent elsewhere.

If any of these facts are new to you, you haven't been doing your due diligence.

I have the deepest respect and sympathy for people who are forced by circumstances to accept these things.

I acknowledge that people's ethical behavior is neither deterministic, nor consistent.

But yeah, GenAI radicalized me.

We do not all have the same job

Joep Schuurkes — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 23:00:00 GMT

At the first conference I ever attended - or I think it was the first, in any case it was Let's Test in 2012 -, I asked someone "So what kind of applications do you test?" And the reply was: "One of the onboard computers of a Saab fighter plane." While at that time I was the test lead for an enterprise service bus.

We do not all have the same job.

In a recent episode of the Quality Remarks podcast hosted by Keith Klain, Paul Holland told the story of an organization where running the test automation took 13 people two weeks. And no, I'm sorry, they didn't go into any detail about what happened in those two weeks. In my current project our pipeline takes 0 people about 17 minutes to run.

We do not all have the same job.

How essential are your testers?

Joep Schuurkes — Tue, 20 May 2025 22:00:00 GMT

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.

So you want to become a test engineer?

Joep Schuurkes — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 23:00:00 GMT

Becoming a test engineer these days is probably harder than it was for me back in 2006. Back then, there was no test automation, we worked in the slow rhythm of waterfall, and for years I was in a team with other testers or at least had a test manager to bounce ideas off. These days, there's a good chance none of these are true as you start as a test engineer.

While most of these changes are good ones (please don't take test automation or agile away), it does make me empathize with anyone who starts their career as a test engineer today. The pace is higher and the skill set is broader. More importantly, you need to navigate your career while no one is really sure where to position testers in their organization. That's not a straightforward environment to start a career in.

So here are four pieces of advice I'd give myself if I'd start my career in testing today:

testing can be many different things
you're a software engineer that specializes in testing
the end-game is leadership skills
shape your career in a way that suits you