4 февр. 2010 г.

Joel Spolsky — Why testers?

joel spolsky
{...} A great tester gives programmers immediate feedback on what they did right and what they did wrong. Believe it or not, one of the most valuable features of a tester is providing positive reinforcement. There is no better way to improve a programmer's morale, happiness, and subjective sense of well-being than a La Marzocco Linea espresso machine to have dedicated testers who get frequent releases from the developers, try them out, and give negative and positive feedback. Otherwise it's depressing to be a programmer. Here I am, typing away, writing all this awesome code, and nobody cares. Boo hoo.


Signs of a good tester:
  • Scientific
  • Loves a good puzzle, even the kind that takes days to solve
  • Likes to think about things methodically
  • Generally likes working with software and computers

...tester {...} who write automated test suites {...} reflects a misunderstanding of what testers are supposed to do, which is evaluate new code, find the good things, find the bad things, and give positive and negative reinforcement to the developers. Sure, automated test suites are a time saver, but testing software covers so much more than that. If you put too much emphasis on those scripts, you won't notice misaligned text, hostile user interfaces, bad color choices, and inconsistency. Worse, you'll have a culture of testers frantically working to get their own code working, which crowds out what you need them to do: evaluate someone else's code.

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