I am a developer, also a Team Lead. I remember now the moment when I realized that if I’m a better developer is also because of the help of a good testers. Initially it was like a cognitive dissonance: how come a good tester help me be a better developer? Even stranger for me was that when I realised this, I was deep involved (still deep involved) with TDD, unit tests and Automated Acceptance Testing.
There are devs who think that if they do tdd/unit tests everything will be ok and testers will do “some clicks”. Or even worse, the testers, for those devs, should check all the nonsense made by a developer, because that developer will not test. So strange. So a developer should not experiment, learn, explore, investigate, find relevant information from his/her own work.
I am sad. I was unable today to defend the real craft of testing (Rapid Software Testing). In a way, I felt that I was not able to defend those testers who contributed to make me better professional. So strange feeling.
Then I begun to think more. Now is a lot of talk regarding “manual” testing and “automated” testing.
Note: I told to a marketing person that she is doing “manual” marketing. And this sound so strange almost like offending. I told her about testing and “manual” testing and she understood. Still I can’t forget that it almost sound offending.
Why do they say “manual” testing? Maybe because a tester should just verify a specification, no matter the form of that specification – wait, I am wrong, is a user story with acceptance criteria, of course. Since is a clear specification, it is imagined, I think, that they can also write what they will test – some will say they write the test…. Hmmm…So, if they can write it down this means they don’t need a tester with experience – may be temporary – , a junior should be enough because anyway acceptance criteria are done by the Product Owner. But if a junior can do it, then … wait we can automate those steps, yes, yes via UI. So, hmm, why not get rid also of the junior tester, because we have the automation which is the ultimate goal actually. A click of a button and that’s it. For sure that automation code will be developed not by experienced developers like it would be the production code, no, no we have “automation” testers.
So why a tester should matter so much when actually he/she is only doing some of the shallow testing a developer must do? Shallow and clear steps which can be done by anyone.
So, I imagine that’s why – briefly described – some testers are being called manual and automated.
If testers spend time on shallow bugs they will not have time to see for deeper ones. Such deep that neither a dev can’t see it.
But what do those testers that I was not capable to defend? They, although they might not phrase it like this: investigate, doubts, searching for information, pose questions, questions everything, do more than confirm acceptance criteria, they challenge the actual criteria, they make definition of done/ready relative when all the other thinks are clear and absolute, are able to begin testing without specifications if needed, be able to show the multidimensionality of a problem/specification/story, use any tools which can help them (not just selenium or…), they will not answer to different problems with same answer because they are aware of context, support developers, …. please see here for a much longer list: http://www.developsense.com/blog/2017/04/deeper-testing-2-automating-the-testing/
Sorry colleagues testers :(.