DEV Community

Value in Dedicated Testing

Jesse Phillips on February 07, 2019

What is software testing? What does a software tester do? What benefits do they bring to the table? James Bach has been trying save software testin...
Collapse
 
setagana profile image
setagana

In Accelerate, Forsgren and co. found that having a QA department who is responsible for the automated testing of releases does not lead to improved IT performance. The logic being that if development is not made responsible for automated test coverage, the applications they create will too often be untestable for a QA department. Forsgren and co. come to the conclusion that the role of the QA team should be a mixture of 1) consulting with the development team on how to create their tests and 2) exploratory testing the applications (presumably looking for unanticipated use cases that weren't covered by the spec). Do you have any thoughts on this theory based on your experience?

Collapse
 
jessekphillips profile image
Jesse Phillips • Edited

This sounds reasonable to me. I think that expectations on QA and the traditional approach to QA record keeping make it hard to find that talent and cultivate it.

One other add I provide the team is organize what changes take place for a release.

Collapse
 
alanmbarr profile image
Alan Barr

Great points. Software Engineers are often too close to the metal to know what's worth chasing and what's not. My question to you would be how do you demonstrate that you do those things for your team? Is there some kind of output from those activities be it conversation, documentation, coaching or others.

Collapse
 
jessekphillips profile image
Jesse Phillips • Edited

What is happening is that this is going outside my team. The people I've work directly with in a detailed capacity are on board. What is happening now is this direction is being pushed to additional teams but I don't generally get direct communication, probably due to this mistake.

I do have documentation which goes over the setup but not graphical and high level.

I'm also very helpful when asked, but not always asked.