Unfortunately, most non-testers have a sketchy understanding of testing, at best. I think we should try to help them learn about it. Especially execs and managers need to understand the value of testing, and how an investment of quality pays off in the long run. Everyone goes around saying they want the best quality, itās like mom and apple pie, but if they arenāt willing to let teams have time to integrate testing activities into coding activities (both are equally important parts of software development), that lip service doesnāt help.
Work to make benefits of testing your own team is doing more visible. Also make the problems caused by lack of testing visible. This can be as simple as highlighting critical bugs in production. Testing isnāt the way to fix those - building quality in is. Testers can help the team learn ways to shorten feedback loops and develop high quality code from the start.
One way to help execs understand might be to show the opportunity cost of things like time spent triaging and fixing bugs in production (and communicating with the irate customers) at the expense of time to build new features. And, we donāt get a lot of chances to show customers the value our product offers, if we blow that chance because we deliver the wrong things or deliver buggy things, itās bad news for the business.