How Much Code Debugging Is The Tester's Responsibility?

I came across this article earlier today.

It did kind of make me think- each organisation has a different level of engagement for testers, but I’ve never heard of testers fixing bugs, unless it happens to be as part of a dev/tester pair.

Our company is currently moving towards testers being involved in the writing of test code as part of TDD, away from the pure “find a bug and pass it back to the developers to establish the details and fix the bug”, or the “find a bug, establish all the details and pass it to the developers to fix it” way we used to work. I’m familiar with the concept of test and throw it back at the developers, as well as test, find the location of the bug with as much detail as possible and get the developer to fix it, but definitely not the find it, fix it yourself approach. Is there anyone here who has been exposed to this? What are your thoughts?

I have personally operated this way and it led me to moving into development for a bit. Depending on how complex the product is a technological QA could very well debug and fix issues. The only problem I can see is that this can be time consuming and sometimes its better to let the experts investigate and fix the issues if there is other pressing testing to be done. My main concern is that a tester should not be the one to sign off on their own code fix.

I’ve never worked in an organization which would expect or require testers to fix the bugs. But it is often expected to determine the exact test case when the error occurs. I consider this debugging too, just not on the code itself. If only one of several very similar cases fail, then there is a chance that the line of code containing a bug can be found within seconds.
I was also never obligated to attach a log to a bug report (not even be able to read the logs), but I often do it because I got a positive feedback from the programmers about that, as that saves their debugging time.

Perfect article, thanks for sharing!

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