A weekly source of software testing news
ISSUE #59 - May 19, 2018
Should developers do testing? If your answer is ‘yes’, how do you teach developers to test? The advice is out there. Note, we are not covering how to teach TDD, that’s a separate topic; TDD is not “testing”, it’s a development technique. We are also not talking about unit tests, which all developers should absolutely employ. This discussion is about manual / exploratory / end-to-end testing of features as they get built.
Can developers test? Yes; but there will be a learning curve.
There are innate reasons why developers might perform poorly at testing, if not specifically trained, and they can take certain steps to improve.
https://simpleprogrammer.com/developers-poor-testers-can-done/
A life coach for software developers (that’s a distinct career path now!) targets his post at developers to explain value of testing as a risk reduction mechanism, gives a clear explanation of why taking those extra 10 minutes to test your own code before checking it in can save a lot of time.
https://simpleprogrammer.com/software-developers-know-testing-qa/
Why should the test team teach developers to test their code, how to do it, and what outcomes to expect:
http://jasmintestscode.com/on-teaching-developers-to-test/
When test engineers act like quality coaches, the successful approach is being more like Batman than like Superman:
https://medium.com/ingeniouslysimple/is-it-a-dev-is-it-a-tester-no-its-a-quality-coach-fe3390dac9ca
Can developers replace testers on agile teams? This report references large studies, makes mixed conclusions: some data indicates that agile teams without dedicated testers perform better on both quality and velocity metrics, other results suggest that having testing professionals on the team is beneficial. (Side note: I wish they’d tested the scrolling on that embedded frame, it’s a dog).
https://premiosgroup.com/shouldnt-able-get-rid-testers-automation-teaching-developers-test/
One way to turn developers into testers is through use of a service like RainforestQA where devs author end-to-end testcases which are then executed by a testing crowd through the platform, removing a lot of the work. This case study is from a team that works in this mode without a dedicated QA team. (Full disclosure: I use RainforestQA, but in conjunction with an in-house quality engineering team.)
A great list of resources structured as a pathway to learning testing for non-testers.
http://katrinatester.blogspot.co.nz/2015/11/testing-for-non-testers-pathway.html
Developer of a testing tool tells an ironic tale of failing to test his code properly before an important demo…
https://blog.bastions.co/qa/a-developers-most-common-afterthought/
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