Hey – who’s the tester anyway?

When I talk to customers about using test tools, often enough, there are widely varying expectations on what the tool needs to do. Predictably, the generalist testers want a simple, easy to use tool that lets them write and run test cases manually, the automation engineers want all that plus a tool that lets them write and run code. The test leads want the tool to generate reports while the test managers want the tool to have analytics along with reports to help them decide when to ship.

Ok, that’s reasonable - is this all? No wait – is it just these guys that are doing the testing? Nope – we also have the business analyst (BA) that does acceptance testing where she acts as an end user. And sometimes, there is a separate group of testers that do only acceptance testing while the developers do the rest of the functional testing along with writing unit tests. Other times, you have a single team of engineers that dev and test the code themselves – no separate group of testers.

Wow! That’s a lot of people trying to test, and I am not even counting the the specialist testers that want to do perf, security, stress testing etc.

Now, if I were to write a tool for writing and running manual tests only, what would be your choice? A simple browser based tool that anyone can access without a client, or a lightweight rich client that also lets you do some funky stuff like record tests in the background or collect debug logs automatically or one heavy monolith that lets you do the superset of all ops possible on both manual and automated tests?

So, tell me, in yourcompany, who does the testing? :-)

Comments

• Anonymous
  February 16, 2010
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  February 17, 2010
  I agree with the previous comment. Dev will do some basic testing and unit testing, QA will do a more indepth tests and automated ui tests, they work closly with dev. our support team will do some basic acceptance testing and testing/logging of any issues a client has. [Anu] Thanks Ryan - does your support team and QA team use the same testing tools to do their testing?

• Anonymous
  April 05, 2010
  It is QA team reponsilibity to do the all tests. I do agree that we do not accept the build without a unit test from Dev team. Sometimes we find plenty of bugs after unit test also. So it is ultimtely our QA team who took the sole responsibility of the feature to be delivered.

• Anonymous
  October 05, 2010
  I agree with Trevellyon. However, there is an important aspect in a tool - shouldnt the bugs (raised by whoever - the client/QA team) also act as future test cases for the developers, so that they shall be regressed by the dev in each release. Hence, a tool should be capable of converting the defects to test cases