Good testers must not shy away from argument. It’s their job to report bad news—and this is not always taken well.
Sometimes it’s hard to pinpoint the source of a bug. Is it a design bug, a coding bug, or maybe a documentation bug? Or perhaps the tester is just confused, and it’s not a real bug at all. Regardless, the tester’s job is to report the problem.
Some testers may go overboard, thinking it’s their job to pass judgment on the developers or force them to do better work. This is not helpful. But good testers need to be the kind of people who are not afraid of other people’s reactions to bad news.
On the other hand, developers often need to avoid the emotional intensity that makes concentration difficult. It is not easy concentrating on complicated technical material hour after hour. I saw developers on my project take much more time diagnosing problems than I would have. It is important to report problems as soon as they’ve been confirmed, and good testers will report a problem once it is reproducible and narrowed down. I saw developers, however, move right into debugging, identifying the faulty code and the build that introduced it. Part of this is attributable to the fact that they had the skills and interest in debugging the code. But it also seemed as if they were reluctant to report that they had found a problem until they knew exactly what they had found. They wanted to avoid a situation where people started speculating as to who or what may have a caused a problem.
Testers need to demonstrate that they can continue to think and work in the face of conflict. I want to see that they will be tenacious, and that they have some faith in their own perspective. Some people have strong technical skills, but are very uncomfortable in these kinds of situations.
Sometimes it’s hard to pinpoint the source of a bug. Is it a design bug, a coding bug, or maybe a documentation bug? Or perhaps the tester is just confused, and it’s not a real bug at all. Regardless, the tester’s job is to report the problem.
Some testers may go overboard, thinking it’s their job to pass judgment on the developers or force them to do better work. This is not helpful. But good testers need to be the kind of people who are not afraid of other people’s reactions to bad news.
On the other hand, developers often need to avoid the emotional intensity that makes concentration difficult. It is not easy concentrating on complicated technical material hour after hour. I saw developers on my project take much more time diagnosing problems than I would have. It is important to report problems as soon as they’ve been confirmed, and good testers will report a problem once it is reproducible and narrowed down. I saw developers, however, move right into debugging, identifying the faulty code and the build that introduced it. Part of this is attributable to the fact that they had the skills and interest in debugging the code. But it also seemed as if they were reluctant to report that they had found a problem until they knew exactly what they had found. They wanted to avoid a situation where people started speculating as to who or what may have a caused a problem.
Testers need to demonstrate that they can continue to think and work in the face of conflict. I want to see that they will be tenacious, and that they have some faith in their own perspective. Some people have strong technical skills, but are very uncomfortable in these kinds of situations.
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