Are you working in an agile environment? If yes, then of course developers and testers work together as a team. They hold daily stand-up meetings to share their progress on the project. Instead of documenting all their tasks, they share the current iteration. It was long back when developers and testers worked separately and in isolation. The agile and DevOps involves QA teams to work in harmony for better results in less time. It is amazing to see things worked quite differently in their pre-agile days. However, some aspects of their work have not changed much.
Changing the way things work when developers and testers join hands
Developers work quite differently than the software testers do. Generally, a developer has to pick a complex feature and break it down into simple units. However, a tester takes a simple feature and looks for all the possible issues around it. Similarly, there are many cases in which testers and developers work in different ways and use different approaches. But that is not what we are looking at, right now. We emphasize on seeing the positive impact of programmers being involved in the testing process for quality assurance. Software testing tools are used during the software development life cycle, simplifying things for the QA teams.
Yes, developers can test!
The good news is, that developers can test. It just depends on the strategy used to involve them in the software testing process. Following are a few how developers can comfortably be part of testing processes:
Using the ‘pair testing’ approach
If you are looking forward to teach some software testing skills to a developer, why not test with them a few times explaining how it actually works. Pair testing is simply an activity where a tester and developer carry out a testing process together. This exercise begins with defining their scope of testing and reviewing all the possible areas of testing they need to cover.
Knowing what developers have already tested while ‘coding’
A tester is supposed to realize the efforts a developer has put into devising a code for an app. Since, testing is not just limited to a single person and involves all team members, developers are also part of the team in agile environments. If the testers know what the developers have tested in code or manually, it will make their job easier. It also makes it easier to spot areas that could have been skipped during the development process.
Define your testing strategy
I believe that developers see testing differently. And so it is important for testers to define the complete testing strategy before beginning. It clarifies the complete testing scenario, including test scripts, test cases and test tools that will be used during the entire process.
Conclusion
We can safely say that software programmers can be very productive for agile teams in software testing processes. They can get their hands on various testing tools to ensure quality products are released. However, there is still more to software testing where developers work in isolation and do not consider working in teams.
