Everyone expects testers to do a great testing job, regardless of whether you get the right information at the right time. There is not much you can do about it. I still remember Bart Simpson‘s phrase „You are damned if you do, and you are damned if you don‘t“. So, if you‘re a tester, you have to get familiar with the fact that you get the blame for defects that are left undetected, and developers get the glory if it works.
Under pressure, we accept that developers make mistakes and create bugs. Surprisingly we roast testers if they miss any, regardless of the circumstances.
Developers win laurels for fixing bugs that they have introduced themselves. How come? Testers are here to find defects. Their real value is recognized often by the kinds of bugs they find. But it never gets published. Of course, who likes to confess that the system is buggy? If the testers can’t find any “great” defects anymore it can mean two things. Either the software is good enough for shipping or the tester missed some important areas for whatever reason. The problem here is that we will never know until the customer uses the feature or the program. There is always some sort of scepticism around because we never know whether the tester found all defects.
But if a customer sees a previously broken feature suddenly working, the users become enthusiastic and grateful even for simple things that should have worked correctly from the very beginning.
About the Author
Torsten Zelger I am in the testing business since 12 years and started straight with test automation. A subject that still fascinates me although today I focus more on automated testing BELOW the UI and manual testing again. Before testing I was developing software myself.
I hold a BS degree in Computer Science, one Diploma of the Swiss Commercial School and an old ISEB software tester certification of London. Besides testing software I exhilarate other “partners in misery” with my cartoon contribution at my blog and also some of those can be found in here.