Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Independent Testers Are Like Parents Of Drug Addicts



Ever heard of "codependence"?

Codependence is a type of dysfunctional helping relationship where one person supports or enables another person’s addiction, poor mental health, immaturity, irresponsibility, or under-achievement [Wikipedia].

It is like being a parent of a drug addict. You are trying to help them beat the addiction, but in helping you can actually feed the addiction. It can be destructive for both parties.
Having independent software testing often leads into the same trap of codependence.

Back in the "good old days" software engineers tested their own code, there weren't software testers, sometimes as a software engineer you got assigned to testing. In my first job in avionics systems you would spend most of your time testing, but you were still a software engineer.

Then in the late 90s, influenced by Y2K, independent testing really got traction. Independent testers look at things differently to the developer, it provides a quality gate. All these things are true and beneficial.

But then software engineers stopped testing! 

That is the independent testers job. They own quality. They will find the bugs because they are good at it. The crappy details nit-picking checking is better done by anybody other than me!

The result is development no longer own quality. Testers find lots of defects that should have been found more efficiently earlier. Buckets of time and schedule is lost as testing is passed over the fence and down the line. Developers are not getting informed of how to improve quality and reduce putting the bugs in the first place. And we are just beating them over the head with lots of public failures that frustrates everyone and puts developers and testers in conflict.

There are seeds of change though. Many agile and continuous quality approaches are putting ownership of testing back in with development and delivery teams, rather than sitting only with testing. Developers are taking on board greater testing responsibilities. Testing is becoming more of a coach and a safety net, providing input to development processes where they can be improved internally to deliver software faster and more reliably.

Last week I reviewed two great pieces of information which made me reflect more on correcting the codependence, I highly recommend you check them out:
So lets take on a role where we both engage in quality. Developers own quality. Testers can provide improvement feedback and act as a safety net. But lets not feed the addiction to poor quality by passing the buck.

And finally a plug for our upcoming conference iqnite Australia, where we are leading the thinking to reshape how organisations are approaching their testing. In 2014 we have a big focus around DevOps, Agile and Continuous Quality, including ideas discussed here.

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