Testing has an image problem. The importance of testing can not be denied however it is generally considered software development’s ugly cousin. Finding skilled practitioners is hard because there are not enough people who want to be testers. Today I won’t delve into why testing is not as enticing as other software development disciplines. Instead I will offer some food for thought.
I have often said (actually spoken, not blogged… but I’m blogging it now) that testers are a lot like lawyers. Nobody actually wants to be us but when something goes wrong, people are always screaming for us (or screaming at us). The primary differences are that lawyers get paid more and we don’t have John Grisham writing about our profession. Lawyers get paid more than testers because their perceived value to an organisation is greater than the perceived value of a tester. John Grisham writes about lawyers because somehow, despite all the lawyer jokes, lawyers are sexier than testers. Perhaps it was Mr Grisham’s work (and others) that made lawyers sexy?
All jokes aside. Lawyers stereotypically spend their time looking at the legal system in order to find a way around the rules to allow their client off. There are a bunch of great movies that all look at this aspect of legal drama. The smart, sexy lawyers find the loophole to help the small child get their insurance payment. Audiences love it. In reality smart, ruthless lawyers find the loopholes to allow the criminal to escape a murder or fraud charge.
Testers spend their time looking at the software system in order to find a way around the rules that create the user experience. In the domain of game development, testers will attempt to ensure that unscrupulous players don’t manipulate the rules to achieve an end that isn’t in the spirit of the game. In lawyer speak this is the Spirit of the Law.
If you think about it, testers are proactively attempting to strengthen the system, as oppose to lawyers which are waiting for lawsuits to reactively find the flaws in the legal system. Surely this should put testers in your mind as some kind of hero, always looking out for other people, thinking ahead and often humble in their achievements. A system with no defects is quiet and there are much fewer complaints. A defective system has people complaining about it, making noise, demanding for it to be fixed.
For those that think the perceived value of a lawyer is greater than that of a tester consider the following choice. Would you prefer someone working hard to stop you from getting into trouble or someone who gets paid to get you out of trouble?
If you still think that the perceived value of a lawyer is greater than that of a tester, perhaps we do need Mr Grisham writing stories about testers. A little bit of a sexy can’t hurt anyway.
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Ryan Boucher is a Software Inquisitor and is passionate about it. You can find a whole raft of articles and anecdotes about software testing and other topics he gets excited about. |
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One Response to “Testing body image”
[...] As I’ve mentioned before, testing has an image problem. There are many reasons for this and in some cases I feel that we, as testers, have ourselves to blame. But before I do that, let me blame everyone else. Organisational management tends to have an obsession for cutting costs in the testing department. Project management often look towards crunching testing when a project runs over schedule? How often is testing recruitment a process of migrating users from business lines or service desk operatives into the testing team? How often is the testing team used as a way to allow coders and business analysts to get up to speed with the system? It’s unacceptable. [...]