Once in every 1 or 2 years – testing team or function comes under “question”. I have seen this consistently for last 20 years. For business leaders, Heads of Business verticals – testing has been a punching bag. Whenever leadership changes or sales go low or profits fall – suddenly discussion on “efficiency” and throughput per person becomes an important metric. Why do we need such a big testing team? why cannot developers do all the testing required? Why not end users do the testing required? why cannot be automate this stuff and get testing head count out of equation? Why cannot we do crowd sourcing? – are the questions that business leaders ask. Testing leads and managers – start running from pillar to post to justify why they exist — come up with all sorts weird metrics and process maps to show why testing required. But business leaders are hell bent on cutting that “extra” fat in the system. There go “testing team ” out of the company.
What is big deal about testing or testers ? They ask. First of all let us ask what is/ required to do testing? Knowledge of the system or business domain or technology that used to build it? Let us explore…
Business analysts know the product inside out as they have “defined” it (by writing down BRD – business requirements document). They should be the ones best suited to do all or required testing. No?
Developers too claim that they know system inside out – as they have created it. They know nuts and bolts of the system where each one is. Should they be the best ones to test the system?
End users are best to test the system as they are the ones that eventually use the system they know what should be there in the application. Are the the best party to test?
Before we respond to above possibilities – let us also look at how industries shaped the views about testing. In software world (or software enabled businesses), broadly there are 3 types of industries – Software product companies, IT services companies and IT organizations or captive units of other (non software) businesses – likes of banks or pharma or Automobiles etc. Each of these have a very specific and unique “culture” about software and hence about testing.
Software product companies call software development as “Engineering” and all activities about creating a software is put under one umbrella “software engineering”. Testing is part of “engineering”. Pre-agile Era had testing as part of “development” life cycle and developers did all testing that they could. Agile and Post Agile (now DevOps era) killed “testing” function or skill or requirement by few beliefs or practices. Agilists extend logic of all testing should be done by developers and said “quality” is every ones’ responsibility. Thru practices like TDD and formalized unit testing – testing as seen as excercising or executing every line of code (they wrote). Testing would mean writing code – hence programming and testing at some point merged into one skill. If you are in an engineering team you did not do coding means – you are either a business analyst or project manager (or scrum master – not ring master !!! 🙂
IT organizations or captive units are next big communities – looked at testing as either some necessary evil or something that programmers or technologists should do. Business leaders of these groups saw entire software development as an alien thing and kept a safe distance from it. For these software or technology was a support function and thought any investment in activities (like testing) related to software development as “distraction” from their main business function. Technology teams in such organizations too had a strange problem or approach. They thought all required knowledge of business domain or application resides with business so technology job is sincerely translating whatever business gave as requirements. No questions asked. They also propagated a view that technology testing is a shallow happy path and basic validation. They believed its not their cup of tea to learn business domain. So where did bulk of testing go? To business and End users in the form of “User acceptance Testing”.
IT services companies did not have any of such challenges about thinking about domain, business, technology and testing. They simply supplied what their clients wanted. Hence IT services companies had mix of both IT org and product company cultures. IT services companies did not have to have their testing culture. In the beginning (pre-2000) – by riding outsourcing wave – went and told their outsourcing bosses – “testing is low risk work – we can take it away and do it for very low cost”. I have heard pricing models of testing services on unit basis – xx $$ per test case. How crazy was that? When they ran out of business supplying “low skilled” (almost brain dead) “executors” of test cases (called manual testers) – they started selling them as business analysts. In that parlance – business analysis did some testing but knew business domain and could “write” BRD’s. Even today many testers think that “business analysts” are one notch above testers in terms of salary and org hierarchy. That option too soon ran out. These companies then started selling failed or low skilled developers as “automation engineers”. This going even today….. skilled testing has been dying… not dead yet.
I ask — what is big deal about testing – what makes testing “tick” in todays situation? Share your views.
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