Testers, It’s Time to Become Best Friends with Your Developers
It’s funny how quickly once-common practices become antiquated within the world of software. You do something the same way for years and years (such as saving all your testing for last), establish an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality, and move forward without really experimenting with other ideas.
If you want to create software in the modern era and maximize the skills of your entire team, you can’t do things the way they’ve always been done. And going back to the late-stage testing example, you just can’t do things the traditional way anymore. Just ask Jeff Morgan, the chief technology officer and cofounder of LeanDog, who’s needed to adapt as the industry’s evolved.
“If you think about the traditional approach that we have, we build something, and then as soon as we're finished building it, we test it. Then as we're leading up to a release, we might have a hardening phase, where we go through a really thorough regression,” he explained in an interview at STAREAST 2017. “Then that's usually when we add more of your security and your capacity type tests, sort of at the end. That doesn't work in the world where I work because as soon as we develop it, it goes straight to production. So there is no time to do that.”
As a writer, you don’t spew thousands and thousands of words and save all your self-editing for the end. If you take the time to check your work along the way, you might find fixable flaws that could infect the rest of your writing. By adjusting early on, you can avoid piling up word after word atop a shaky narrative foundation.
It’s the same with software, and it’s why testers need to become closer to their developers. By staying in constant contact, you can better understand what you’re testing, what you’re hoping to achieve, and how to make each aspect of the application better. Shift left is more than a fad—it’s the new direction for software testing.
“There still is a huge emphasis on testing, because like I said, we have to keep the quality high, but what tends to happen is this realization that, first of all, the majority of the things that we throw on the shoulders of testers really doesn't require testing skills,” Morgan continued. “For example, going and looking to make sure something looks the same across three different browsers. You don't need to be a tester to do that.”
Collaboration between testers and developers is more important than ever, so instead of drawing lines between the two, it’s better to have them come together and work toward a common goal.
