The perception from most of the management is that the Testers are the quality police for the products / projects that they develop. This is true for most of the companies where there is no Quality Assurance group.
What do i mean by a Quality Police ?
- Is the requirements freeze done for the product
- Did we write all the specs like SRS, Design Docs, Uses Cases
- Are the developers writing Unit Tests ?
- Are the developers testing the builds before pass on the same to Test
- This list goes on…
There are testers who are trying to do the above and i call them as Quality Police .
Where does this attitude come from ?
The attitude of acting like a Quality Police for testers is injected by the management from the beginning of their careers. So they expects the same as they go along with their career and this attitude spoils the relationships between developers and testers.
Acting like Quality Police and trying to get things done is more of process which need to be followed by all the teams and let's not take that up. Let the management take care of the process management too.
What is Quality ?
Wikipedia describes quality assurance as follows
Quality Assurance is the activity of providing evidence needed to establish confidence among all concerned, that the quality-related activities are being performed effectively. All those planned or systematic actions necessary to provide adequate confidence that a product or service will satisfy given requirements for quality. Quality Assurance is a part and consistent pair of quality management proving fact-based external confidence to customers and other stakeholders that product meets needs, expectations, and other requirements. QA (quality assurance) assures the existence and effectiveness of procedures that attempt to make sure – in advance – that the expected levels of quality will be reached.
Read more on Quality Assurance from wikipedia
It's worth noting here that Good Quality doesn't come from less bugs in the product. I have seen people whose assumption is that if a product contains bugs it's of less quality and in case if it doesn't it's of more quality. I would say that we can't measure the quality of the products just with Bugs. I have never seen any product which doesn't have bugs in it.
Are the Testers responsible for the Product Quality ?
The Testers test the product and report bugs. Some of these bugs will get fixed for the release in case if they are import. You can't build quality into systems just by reporting bugs and helping developers to fix them.
Assuring the quality into Products under development is the responsibility of all the teams associated with Product Development
So What should be the Role of Tester then
The role of the Tester to test software, find bugs, report them so that they can be fixed. The Bug Reports should be clear, easy to reproduce, reduce the time to debug the same for developers and the report should motivate the developers to fix the issue asap.
Tester should focuses on the software product itself and gathers important information regarding what it does and doesn't do. The process of gathering should include all the teams associated with the product. Talks to management, sales, architects, development, support and gather their expectations over the release.
Don't you think that this is a big job all by itself and need lot of time. As i keep saying the Role of the Tester is to provide qualitative information on the product to the management for the better decisions. So the big challenge here is to provide accurate, comprehensive, and timely information about the product under development.
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