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The Top 5 Wrong Reasons For Not Hiring Testers
Considering whether or not your software company should hire a dedicated team of testers? Here are the Top 5 Wrong Reasons why you shouldn't. We Have a Beta Program I've spent the last 5 years in the telecommunications industry where the standard for reliability is 5-9. If I even suggested to my customers that my software was in its Beta phase, they'd hang up on me immediately. I'm positive the same is true in any industry. Imagine if I published articles that were not only full of grammatical errors but also missed a complete sentence here and there. Would you bother sending me an email to inform me that my articles are defective? Would you recommend my newsletter to your peers? I didn't think so! So imagine how your customers feel when mission critical software breaks and crashes on them. Developers Will Get Lazy If your developers are lazy, don't blame your testers. Blame the developers! Not hiring a team of dedicated testers won't improve the situation. It'll actually make the problem worse because your sloppy developer's code will find itself in your customer's hand instead of your testers' lab. We Can't Afford Testers If it takes you 50 person-months to develop software, you will (statistically speaking) spend 25 person-months testing and validating it. Which do you think is more economical? Assigning 25 person-months of testing to developers or testers? As explained in Quality is Job #1, one of my previous articles which lists reasons why software companies should hire a dedicated team of testers, professional QA people are more efficient at verifying software than developers are. It's their job! Keep the 1:3 ratio in mind and hire 1 tester for every 3 developers, even if it means getting rid of your bottom-of-the-barrel developers to maintain a balanced human capital budget. Testers Find Too Many Bugs If you think your testers are really finding too many insignificant bugs, give them guidance. Don't ridicule their effort or disregard their problem reports. Explain the use cases you're trying to satisfy and the known (and acceptable) limitations of the system. We Can't Find/Keep Any Good Testers Here are 3 suggestions to keep your testers on your QA team for as long as possible:
After reading dozens of opinions on the subject, I'm still convinced that having a dedicated team of testers is well worth the investment. You can disagree with me, but if you do, make sure it's for the right reasons. Luc Richard holds an MBA with a major in high technology. For the past 10 years, he's been managing the development of software applications. He is the founder of The Project Mangler (http://www.projectmangler.com), an online resource that publishes free articles, stories, and other ready-to-use tools to help developers, team leaders and managers deliver software projects on time, according to specs, and within budget.
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