This question is marked as a community wiki, and is subjective, but please don’t close it, I think its a good question, and I would like to know what the development community have to say about testing.
I’ve been a developer for over 10 years, and I’ve yet to work in a company that has a dedicated testing department. Over the years I’ve seen the attitude towards testing get steadily worse, lately management are after quick results, and quick deployment, and there are lots of teams out there that simply forget the science of development, and omit serious testing.
The end result is – management is satisfied with the speed of development initially, the app might even run stable in production for a while, but after that something is bound to snap. Depending on the complexity of the app, a lot could go wrong, and sometimes all at once. In most cases, these issues are environment driven making them hard to isolate and fix. The client is the entity who is ultimately taking on the role as stress testing, because like it or not, someone eventually HAS to test the app.
During this phase, management feels let down by the developer. The developer feels management didn’t listen in the first place to the pleas for significant testing, and the customer looses faith in the software. Once order is eventually restored, if the product survives this. The developer is ultimately the one who gets blamed for not outputting a stable product, and for now going way over budget in man days, because the developer spent 2-3 times more on testing the app (eventually).
Is this view point realistic? Does anyone else feel this strain? Should developers be taking professional courses in testing? Why is testing being left behind? Or is this just my bad fortune to have had this experience over the last 10 years of my career.
Any thoughts welcome. Please don’t close the question.
In my opinion developers should never test, since they test “does it work?”.
A test engineer on the other hand, tests if something “does not work”, which is a very important difference in my opinion.
So let other people do the testing, test engineers preferably or otherwise functional analysts, support engineers, project managers, etc…