Should you have Testers?
September 9, 2022•221 words
I once worked for a company that had no testers. Software developers but no testers. Zero.
I was really surprised.
Even more surprising was the absence of testing or staging environments!
How was the quality?
It was actually not bad at all. It was even better than in other organizations that had almost as many testers as there were developers.
How could this be?
It turned out that there was a culture of testing. Developers knew that nobody was coming after them to check their code, the production environment, or customer satisfaction. They had to do it all by themselves.
What did the developers do when they found a bug in production? They relied a lot on logging, some automated tests, automated monitoring, small and frequent releases, and fixing-forward: fixing the issue instead of rolling back.
It was incredibly fast and efficient.
Testing is a mindset first, it’s an attitude. A focus on quality. Anyone can adopt this mindset.
Also, if a developer is humble enough to ask for a code review, they can ask a peer to test their code.
I’m not saying this is what I recommend. There have been costly mishaps.
But think about how better your product development team would be if developers had a culture of testing.
How would you develop this culture where you are?