Years ago, there were many myths like: “testing is a monkey job”

Quality matters on today’s market. Users do not compromise bad quality. Competition on the market is growing so that ISVs and service providers are revising their approach to quality assurance, and software testing as the main part of it.

  Not only development should be done by professionals. Testing as well!

 Years ago, there were many myths like: “testing is a monkey job,” “good developers do not do bugs,” “testing is boring,” “Scrum does not say anything about tester role,” “if you have not succeeded in programming, try testing,” etc. However, the reality shows that

• Testing requires very special mindset, like any other project role. For example, being a developer, you will never focus on breaking something you diligently created before. You will not consider all possible negative cases. You will not dive into the scrupulous analysis of formal and implied requirements to prevent possible issues.
• Testing requires very special knowledge. You need to have a perfect understanding of software development process, overall testing approach and methods, many specific kinds of testing and how to apply them. You need to possess strong technical background combined with business analytical skills.
• Professional testing implies appropriate experience. Knowledge should be gained and supported by various projects, various technologies, business domains, methodologies, and tools.
• Moreover, of course, effective testing requires dedication. It is impossible to assure quality if you have been involved in the project on the very last stage, without any deep understanding and thorough preparation to testing.

I see that Scandinavia is still quite behind in understanding testing field and, correspondingly, in testing competence development. The profession is not popular still, there are not so many QA&Testing communities and conferences, no appropriate education. While demand from the market is growing, companies have to solve the gap their own way. The most typical situation looks as follows:

• Someone “promising” is assigned a Test Manager/Test Lead role in project/organization.
• There are no dedicated professional testers. Instead, Business Users are doing testing, mainly at the end of the release.
• -When it comes to specific kinds of testing, like performance, security, API testing, it’s not implemented at all.
• Unexpected peaks in testing and gradually growing test scope lead to real capacity problems.
• Late bugs finding increase fixing costs significantly.
• At the same time, final product quality could be better.

So, if we summarize, business challenge is always a combination Competence, Capacity, and Cost.

 Recognize yourself?

 If the answer is Yes, it is time to focus on fixing the problem. There are following ways to choose:

1. Invest in building professional test function in your organization (recruit either experts or just promising guys and conduct professional training for them)
2. Find the vendor providing professional testing services
3. Find the vendor providing professional testing services who, also, will help you to build your own test function within a clear timeframe.