Is Software Tester a Most Infamous Person in a Software Project Team?

The fact that a software tester is a most infamous person in a software project team has some grounds underneath it. This is because a software tester usually speaks of the bugs in the developer's code. For a developer to take this pin-pointing personally hurting is humane. The tussle between the testers and developers may lead to failure or delay of the software project. This article presents some of the aspects which both the developer and the tester should know about each other and work harmoniously in a team.

The developer should understand that testing is an important activity in a software project and the role of the tester is to find as many bugs as possible at the earliest and ensure that they get fixed. If the developed software satisfies customer's requirements and has little number of known bugs then only the customer will accept the software. So, pin-pointing by tester should be taken by the developer in a positive sense. It is the duty of the tester to find bugs and by doing this he is, infact, suggesting you to remove bugs and thereby, dress your code in a proper way.

At the same time, the tester should not directly blame the developer for the buggy code. Psychologically, this will unrest the developer and may lower his efficiency. Instead, a tester should report a bug in a gentle way. The tester should not only report bugs but at times, he should praise the developer for the good code written by him.

As the software are becoming complex, testing is becoming an integral and a methodological process. Lots of theories and practices of testing are becoming standards.And companies are even spending lot of time and money on deciding terminologies of testing like some companies prefer saying a bug as 'anomaly' or 'incident' rather than 'fault', 'bug' or 'error'.

A good tester will have the knowledge of coding language used in the project. In this way, he can sometimes read the buggy code and identify the exact bug along-with and may even propose a solution.

Before reporting a bug, it is important for a tester to know if his test procedure was correct. It happens many times that the bug reported was the result of wrong testing .

So, if you are a software tester then understand the psychology of a developer, appreciate him at times and if you know coding then help him to debug and improve the code. This way you will have good fame in your project team rather than as a dreaded person.

Syed Feroz Zainvi has obtained M.Tech. (Comp Sc & Engg) degree from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (INDIA). His areas of interests are distributed computing, computer graphics and Internet Technologies. Currently, he is involved in Software Project Planning, Development and Management. His other interests include writing for magazines and contributing utility softwares on Magazine's CDs. He also have flair for teaching computer science with new teaching methodologies.

His web-page URL is http://zainvi.tophonors.com