BASF used a variation on the above as it's corporate tagline. Michael Hunter,
the technical lead for my test team, used this as part of his auto
signature for quite some time. It should be the motto for every software
test/qa organization.
For those who don't know him, Adam Barr worked for microsoft from 1990 to 2000, and wrote a book called proudly serving my corporate masters. He commented on a comment to a post I'd made about testing at microsoft. Here's a couple excerpts from his comments.
So what I am trying to argue in the book is that testers are just
as important as developers, in fact they may be more important, but
it's not because they are as good developers as the developers, it's
because they are good testers! That should be reason enough to respect
them. In fact I make the claim that Microsoft started out in the "era of
the developer", moved to the "era of the program manager" around 1990
when Windows 3.0 shipped, and has now moved to the "era of the tester"
-- except nobody realizes this, and it is hurting the company.
Anyway you can read the book (it's linked to online from my
website if you don't want to buy a copy) to get the full argument, it's
scattered throughout chapter 3, on pages 40-60. But please understand
that I was trying to raise testers up to equality with dev and PM. I'm
not sure what "He further rants negatively about testers especially in
chapter 4" means but I don't recall doing any negative ranting about
testers. I rant negatively about the ATTITUDE towards testers. The quote
on p. 50 about "for a variety of reasons they are viewed as lower on
the pecking order than program managers and developers" is not me
bragging about the way things should be, it's me lamenting about the way
they are.
Adam, thanks for clarifying your books points. I
think that Adam and I are in agreement about the way things were, and
that attitudes needed changing and understand that testing is currently a
bottleneck in delivering quality software. I believe that the companies
views have changed significantly in the last 2-3 years. Bill Gates
quote from May 2002 : http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20020517S0011
INFORMATIONWEEK: When we were on Microsoft's campus in March, it
became clear that some people there think they've been developing
quality software for years; in other words, it's not a new concept to
them. And we got a sense that a few people were a little bit defensive
about it.
GATES: Well, let's separate out quality from security. Microsoft
in terms of this quality stuff--we have as many testers as we have
developers. And testers spend all their time testing, and developers
spend half their time testing. We're more of a testing, a quality software organization than we're a software organization.
Now where Adam Barr and I may disagree: I want to hire people who are
both great testers as well as being great developers; I don't see these
skills as mutually exclusive. I took my current job to start a new
group 2 years ago. From day one we've worked to hire people who have
strong testing experience or aptitude, and are skilled developers. Given
the resource constraints, and the longevity of software servicing, as a
manager, I must pursue 100% test automation as aggresively as possible,
and have the automation completed as close to feature completion as
possible. To build the framework necessary to deliver on this goal, you
have to have strong developers. It's simply not a simple task.
Think about it like this: students at school, or developers from
other companies, have lots of knowledge on how to solve typical problems
in software engineering. How to design a 2 tier or 3 tier data bound
application; how to draw bezier curves; how to implement pixel shading
support, etc, etc. There are books for every aspect of software
engineering. Need a sort? Just look it up. How about jpeg compression?
Again, just look it up. I'm not saying that everything developers do is
regurgitate code. There is room for lots of creativity. But there just
aren't books or classes yet on how to write a test harness that can be
shared by a development team and a qa team to run both unit tests and
functional tests, that runs in process and out of process with respect
to the application being tested. How about designing software that
automates the installation of Operating Systems and other prerequisites?
How about building a verification system that can test that your bezier
curve is actually rendered correctly?
That's why I believe that during the next decade, the hardest
problems we have in software engineering are in the realm of testing. It
may not be glamorous work; the code we write never gets put onto a
single customer's computer, yet quality is still the single most
important feature we ship in every product. If it works as expected,
people will have the ability to love it (of course, it also has to do
something they care about for them to actually love it); if it is buggy,
people will hate it, no matter how many killer features are in the box.
Getting the product to market in a timely fashion at that quality bar,
and putting the product in a position to be sustained without
continually pulling resources away from the next version, unless you
have unlimited resources (hah!), requires you to have quality test
automation. To implement that, of course, brings me full circle back to
my point on hiring people who are both great testers and great
developers.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/adamu/archive/2004/07/23/192366.aspx
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