Anyone who has been in the software industry for a while has probably come across jokes, memes, or comments about the strained relationships between testers and developers. Testers get frustrated and complain about developers saying things like, “It works on my machine.” Meanwhile, developers dismissively joke that testers are people who couldn’t make it as developers because they’re too rigid and prone to thinking up new problems and unlikely edge cases.
Some people may read that and feel upset by these generalizations, thinking that this is not how things are anymore and that developers would no longer treat a colleague — tester or otherwise — like that.
I started as a developer, then moved into testing, and I agree that a lot of progress has been made. However, I still see the same jokes and new memes in the same spirit. I still hear many testers telling the same stories of feeling misunderstood, ignored, or left out. And I still hear about engineering organizations that struggle to assign the same value to a tester as to a developer.
So why is that?
The idea of “builders and breakers”
The notion that developers are builders and testers are breakers is mostly flawed but still holds a grain of truth. Software development is an act of creation focused on finding a solution to a problem. The art of software testing, on the other hand, focuses more on finding scenarios where our proposed solution does not solve the problem. Testers and developers have a lot of contradicting goals and values.
Developers often have goals focused on speed and delivery as well as working, compilable code. Testers’ goals are often more aimed at stability and minimizing risk. It’s written into their work tasks, descriptions, and, not to forget, often what they are measured on.
Managers don’t set goals for or reward how much code a tester ships or how many bugs a developer finds before releasing to production. Who is to say if these goals would make any sense? The point is — leaders and organizations get what they measure and reward, so it’s important to be aware of how that might affect relationships between different teams, roles, and departments.
Testers and developers want the same thing for different reasons
Testers and developers focus on different aspects of the work, but they also share many goals and values. In the end, everyone wants to have a working product that users like. Everyone wants to sleep well at night without worrying about a lawsuit. They all want something to be proud of. But what gives one person that sense of pride might be very different for someone else.
For a developer, it might be seeing their code running and knowing how many tricky problems they had to solve along the way. For a tester, it might be knowing their work helped identify and solve a massive security issue. The problem is that people are not very good at talking about goals and motivators, even for themselves. And if they are not aware of them, how can they articulate them to someone else? And if they don’t express them, how will others know and understand them?
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This is a snippet of an article I wrote for Qase. Read the article here.
