Back in the 90s, I started life as a Developer. I loved it. Nothing beats the feeling of creating code from scratch and showing off the results to anyone who is prepared to watch. As I moved from a nerdy teenage novice into a professional developer, the fun always seemed to stop when I had to submit my code for Testing. Having a healthy ego and watching others get paid to poke holes in my work proved tough. Whilst I knew testing was for the greater good, it still, well, "sucked" to see bugs (often multiple) come back, seemingly mocking my mistakes.
Fast forward to now, where my keyboard time in coding is limited to personal projects and the occasional peer support. Rather than testing resources being a "spotlight on my bugs", in a delivery and leadership capacity, testing often becomes the deciding factor as to whether my initiatives will "make the date". It would be easy to assume that I still feel afraid of testing, that they are still the "blocker" between success and failure. Age, experience, and having seen my fair share of the critical impacts caused by software defects now make me view testing differently. Testing is our saviour against a greater evil……production Issues.
I can't say it isn’t frustrating every time I see a Bug raised that pushes my schedule; however, what I now focus on is that every issue discovered in testing is one less potential critical issue avoided in Production.
While it took me some time to change my tune, I now find myself being challenged and justifying the importance of testing to business stakeholders keen to "make their dates". The call to shorten test cycles and decrease testing resources is often justified because "if the delivery team does their job properly in the first place, it should be needed anyhow....so tell them to get it right". Ultimately (and not based on the assumption that the developers are incompetent, as asserted), testing slows down projects at the worst time, towards the end. Comments such as "When the hell are the testers going to stop finding issues?" and "Can’t we just stop the testing so they don't find anything more?" are all too common questions/requests arising in Steering Committees and other Leadership forums. Whilst elements of this are purse expressions of frustration, I do have to regularly communicate, educate and reaffirm the value of testing through the earlier mentioned reminder that"every issue discovered in testing is one less potential critical issue avoided in Production".
So,
Developers, teenagers through veterans, I invite you to pause the next time you find yourself as a developer "facing off" with a tester about the importance of an issue, that they might just have helped you avoid an embarrassing issue down the track.
Project Managers & Business Leaders, remember that anything found "now" by testing might just save your next business-critical IT failure.......Better to find it now in isolation, or when it really, really might hurt.
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