Developers and Testers
Should ‘developers’ rely on ‘testers’ for large projects? Or should they be responsible for their own testing?
I have been working with a few developers part of a larger firm that ‘hand off’ code to testers when they feel it is ‘done’. In my mind the developer should religiously check their own code as they work on it and only consider it done if they have checked it from every angle they can think of. Only later would testers come through to find the very unobtrusive ‘bugs’. Above all, a tester should never be a crutch for the developer.
There are developers out there that seem accustomed to just getting code to ‘work’ and then move on. I wonder if they realize they are causing more problems than they solve?
Here is the minimum I think a developer should do before moving on to the next task:
- Get the code to work as specified.
- Check the code in a live environment (user side etc).
- Try to ‘break it’ by doing things unexpected. Users will RARELY do things as planned.
- Check the systems code is connected to for issues.
- If a web app – check in the 3 most popular browsers.
- Ask someone else to take a look.
- Fix any issues.
- Test again.
- Fix.
- Repeat steps 6-8.
- Mark as ‘done’ when you don’t run into issues.
- Submit for ‘testing’ (if you have a dedicated team for testing.)
In most cases, this takes an extra 5-10 minutes work for the developer working on the code and will save uncountable time for the tester and the project as a whole. The tester can then focus on the unobtrusive issues instead of wasting time going back and forth on the obvious ones. The tester should have to work very hard to find problems.
I am anxious to hear opinions on this workflow issue, especially from developers accustomed to working with dedicated testers.
Developer’s should be 100% responsible for the testing and release of there programming. I myself, being a web developer spend quite alot of time testing my work. unfortunitly I do not have the perks of a testing team at this stage, even if I did I would still keep my initial view.
Ok, so I understand that time is money and it will seem more efficient for the company to hire a team of testers, on a substantialy less wage than to pay the development team. But I am sure that the cost on a whole for the entire process would be more efficient if they had passionate Developers.
I agree. It also seems that as firms get larger and the work load increases they loose something. Its like the day becomes a series of tasks (get this projects coding done, ok, on to the next unrelated project) and the overall view of the project is lost.
This is why I like to handle a small amount of projects at a time and if I’m working with a team have them dedicated to the project.
If you are ever looking to outsource some of your development work steer clear of the larger firms. You get much better work from small groups and individual freelancers.