How I was ashamed to be a software tester
“Hey, what do you do?” — “I’m a QA engineer, I’m testing software” — “Oh I see, are you planning to become a developer later?”
Have you heard this before? If you are a QA engineer I bet you did. So did I. Many times in my life. There might be different variations of people’s reaction, but it all leads to the same conclusion — you are just not a good enough developer, that’s why you stuck in QA. And my answer to it is “hell no!” I love my job and I find it important, not a bit less important than development. I’m proud of being a QA engineer. But it was not always like that. Let’s start from the beginning..
I’ve been working in software testing for a bit more than 5 years by now. Surrounded by developers, I always felt that I was doing a secondary job. That’s how it is was. I even remember meeting new people and being uncomfortable about talking that I’m working as a tester.
So I have started to think about my job. First of all I like being a tester and don’t want to switch to development.
So if I like my job why cannot I be proud of it? Why other people see it differently? I have started questioning the whole idea of testing.
What is Quality Assurance indeed? According to Wikipedia, Quality Assurance (QA) is a way of preventing mistakes or defects in manufactured products and avoiding problems when delivering solutions or services to customers. We are talking about quality of the product. That sounds like a serious job, isn’t it? What can be more important than quality if you think about it? Why it’s so often not respected in the software world?
If we refer to some other professions which require quality assurance, it will be a totally different story. Let’s take QA role in Pharmaceutical Industry. This role mean detailed examination if the product or service fulfills quality and safety requirements. Basically there are people who are responsible for the public health. In this case it’s an important respectful job. Nobody wants to die from a headache pill because it was not tested properly.
Let’s take another branch, Car Manufacturing for example. Quality control means here to inspect and find all possible weaknesses, mechanical problems and other defects of components. The goal is to make cars more reliable. Experienced quality engineers work in the assembly line.
There are many other examples where QA is considered as a serious job and I believe many people will not disagree here. We all want to drive a save car, take a flight to vacation and do not worry about the plane, live in a house which is solid and the roof is not leaking and so on and so on.
If quality plays such a big role in our lives, why do we close our eyes when we talk about software quality? Is the word “engineer” lost it’s meaning in this profession? Not for me!
For me software testing is not a dumb clicking through the app! This job does not stop in testing of websites and mobile apps. There is many complex systems which require deep knowledge of dedicated people. And software testers are these people to me, people who are experts in the system they work with. And it does not have to be automated testing, manual testing is still valid! It’s good to go in the direction of automation but in many cases you need to do manual testing as well, be open to it.
A good tester will identify the issue on the early stage and give a fast feedback to a developer
“There is no better way to improve a programmer’s morale, happiness, and subjective sense of well-being than to have dedicated testers who get frequent releases from the developers.“ writes Joel Spolsky, a software engineer and writer, CEO of Stack Overflow. And I could not agree more with this.
A good tester can be a key element between developers and product owners; can not only find weaknesses in code, but also guide developers to a proper solution; take responsibility for features and stand for his/her team. This role is quite broad if you look closely on it. We should understand better and don’t underestimate the role of QA engineer in the software world, learn to respect this job and find proper people for it.
In the end I would like to refer to a story which inspired me to look at testing from a different perspective and see that it can be appreciated in the software world. This is a story from The Code Book by Simon Singh of the invention of RSA algorithm — one of the first practical public-key cryptosystems.
Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman (R.S.A.) made several attempts over the course of a year to create a one-way function that is hard to invert. Rivest and Shamir, as computer scientists, proposed many potential functions while Adleman, as a mathematician, was responsible for finding their weaknesses. In April 1977, they spent Passover at the house of a student and drank a good deal of Manischewitz wine before returning to their home at around midnight. Rivest, unable to sleep, lay on the couch with a math textbook and started thinking about their one-way function. He spent the rest of the night formalizing his idea and had much of the paper ready by daybreak. Rivest finished off the paper by listing the authors alphabetically: Adleman, Rivest, Shamir.
The next morning, Rivest handed the paper to Adleman, who went through his usual process of trying to tear it apart, but this time he could find no faults. His only criticism was with the list of authors. “I told Ron to take my name off the paper,” recalls Adleman. “I told him that it was his invention, not mine. But Ron refused, and we got into a discussion about it. We agreed that I would go home and contemplate it for one night, and consider what I wanted to do. I went back the next day and suggested to Ron that I be the third author. I recall thinking that this paper would be the least interesting paper that I will ever be on.” Adleman could not have been more wrong. The system, dubbed RSA (Rivest, Shamir, Adleman) as opposed to ARS, went on to become the most influential cipher in modern cryptography.
Testing is not for everybody, but if you happen to be a software QA engineer, be dedicated, be curious, be patient!
