What Is It That Software Testers Do?

SQuAD June, 2014

scott.m.allman@gmail.com

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Software testing is to find bugs. - Glenford Myers

You are the headlights of the project. - Kaner, Bach, and Pettichord

Design, coding and debugging are done by developers. Testing is done by testers. - Boris Beizer

We help the business and the development team decide the right s/w features to build, and we help build them in a good way so that valuable software is delivered frequently and at a sustainable pace for the team. - Lisa Crispin

Software testers do things to create, organize, and distribute information about the quality of the product so that others can make better decisions. - Lee Copeland

Software testers investigate the product, learn about it through experimentation, and report on what they’ve found to help their clients determine whether the product they’ve got is the product they want. - Michael Bolton

Testers provide [quality] information so others in the organization can make better informed decisions. - Doug Hoffman

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Capturing Data 3

Employers - RESPONSIBILITIES ?4

Employers - Skills5

Quality Assurance Institute

Association for Software Testing

(AST courses begin with BBST)

International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB)

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Training and Certification

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What do Course Designers/Certifiers think we do?7

Software Testing Conferences

SQuAD

CAST

Star(s) West, East, Canada

STPCON

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What do Software Conferences think we do?9

The Four Traditional Roles of a Software Tester

Journalist: Objectively gathers and reports observations. Advocates for bug fixes.

Experimenter: Designs experiments and builds apparatus to run them.

Technician: With careful attention to detail runs experiments.

Trusted Colleague: Supplies timely information to decision makers.

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Role: Journalist

Traditional tools: Defect tracking systems, wikis Newer Tools: Blogs, twitter, JUnitReport

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Bug reports are not just neutral technical reports. They are persuasive documents. The key goal of the bug report author is to provide high-quality information, well written, to help stakeholders make wise decisions about which bugs to fix. • Bug reporting as persuasive writing • Bug investigation to discover harsher failures and

simpler replication conditions • Making bugs reproducible • Lessons from the psychology of decision-making:

bug-handling as a multiple-decision process dominated by heuristics and biases.

• Style and structure of well-written reports

Role : Journalist

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• James Prescott Joule

• Brewer and physicist who made careful observations about heat to improve the economics of the family business.

Role: Technician

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Role: Technician

• A quick survey …

• Understand terminology of software testing. See the ISTQB glossary of terms.

• Traditional tools: Attention to detail, reliability, quick learning

• Newer tools: Project, operating system and company specific

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Experimenter: Slide from BBST “Test Design”

• Create and sample data

• Design experiments

• Build tests

• Build the apparatus

• Explore

Role: Experimenter

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Trusted Colleague

• Survey

• Traditional tools: QA “Go NoGo” decision.

• Newer tools: Information supplier

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Why are there so many types of tests, tools and testers?

My answer, “What is it that software testers do?”

Design, build OR run experiments

Communicate observations OR analyses

A trusted source of information

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REMINDERS

Thanks to SQuAD

Upcoming SQuAD conference

Other roles for software testers?

More questions?

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