The Tester’s Role: Balancing Technical Acumen and User Advocacy
If you’ve been in software testing or QA for a while, you’ve likely seen the major shifts our industry has taken—especially in the last few years, when testing became not only a widely accepted discipline with most companies, but a sought-after role with many technologists just starting or restarting their careers.
Shifts are good. They are excellent indicators that someone is paying attention, and they make people less likely to become complacent. However, shifts can be perceived as bad if you’re not one to flex with change very well.
The first major shift that influenced our role as testers happened with the Y2K phenomenon. We realized that companies were not only paying attention to the value testers provided, but also investing in new roles for us. Suddenly, we had an influx of jobs we could choose from across all sectors.
Many of us had nontechnical roles and decided to make the leap to technology more formal, and testing was a great jumping-off point to do that. We had the mindset of a user because we were users, and we tested like them. We found bugs that our “real” users would have found after a release.
Fast-forward a few years to when another shift happened. Most mainstream companies had an established formal testing team, or at least a testing practice that had a seat at the software development lifecycle table. Many engineering practices formed when we broadened our technical expertise and tested below the UI; we started testing as close to the code as we possibly could.
Our companies invested in expensive commercial tools so we could automate our UI tests and focus on working closely with our development counterparts. The role of software developer engineer in test became the new buzzword for job descriptions, and we hired computer science majors with the assumption that we could teach testing on the fly. We dismissed the practice of testing and assumed that anyone who could write code could also test it comprehensively.
Both of these shifts increased the visibility of the value testers provide, but I believe it caused an imbalance in our overall role—shifting way right from a user acceptance role to way left as a technical liaison role.
By identifying these shifts (and others) and their impact on our industry, my team has created an operating model that emphasizes the value of both technical acumen and user advocacy while encouraging balance between them. By building an automated testing and exploratory testing strategy that’s successful and well-defined, we can achieve that balance while ensuring our role continues to provide value.
Melissa Tondi is presenting the session The Tester’s Role: Balancing Technical Acumen and User Advocacy at STARWEST 2016, October 2–7 in Anaheim, California.
