During TestBash Careers yesterday, our community members suggested a few questions you can encounter when attending an interview.
As these questions will need answers, I thought: ‘what better place to ask them than at The Club?’
I’ll be creating a series of posts, one for each of the questions raised by the community, and open the discussion for you all to contribute with your thoughts and together help our fellow community members who are looking to interview (both interviewee and interviewer).
Question #11: How do you feel about the phrase, "Testers break software”?
How would you answer this in an interview?
If you don’t know the answer, how would you tell your interviewer you don’t actually know the answer?
How might you reframe this question if you were to ask this as an interviewer?
Assuming that you accept the premise (and there’s a whole other argument about the assumptions behind “Testers break software” and how they should be challenged), one off-the-cuff rebuttal to that would be “better that testers break it than users.”
Do editors destroy the written word? It is understandable that people are protective of their code. It not only represents their hard work but, through their creativity, they have instilled a little part of themselves into it. However, sometimes this means that people can lose objectivity when reviewing their own code. In the same way as an editor, a tester can provide a valuable third-party insight into potential areas of weakness. By working with the respective creator to identify potential areas of improvement, testers can help provide a better overall product.
I won’t agree with such words, instead, I would prefer to say that testers ensure what software must and must not do.
Developers usually build the software with the mindset of what software must do but testers start testing from the end-user perspective and ensure that software must do what it is supposed to do and they must not do what they are not supposed to do.
There is a better way to ask the candidate what exactly the tester does while testing the software or what the expectations are from the tester while testing the software.
Question #11: How do you feel about the phrase, "Testers break software”?
How would you answer this in an interview?
I don’t think testers break software, so much as draw attention to areas which are already broken / not behaving in an acceptable manner. Smoke detectors alert you to fires, but they don’t set them
If you don’t know the answer, how would you tell your interviewer you don’t actually know the answer?
“I’m not sure I understood the question correctly. Could you rephrase it?”
“In which context is this question being asked - is there a particular reason for asking it?”
How might you reframe this question if you were to ask this as an interviewer?
“Some people say that a tester’s job is to break software. Do you agree with this, and why?”
I’d tend to go down the path of part of my role is to evaluate if the product is already broken, to do that its likely I will break multiple instances of the product to establish that.
Crash test dummies can maybe be an okay way of explaining this, those guys do indeed break a lot of cars but their goal is to evaluation, whether its already broken in some way, what its limits are.
Like the crash test dummies we don’t really break the overall product but we may break instances of it to evaluate and learn about its strengths, weaknesses and opportunities for improvement
Like many others here I would not use that phrase in my communication.
Testers/QA Specialists/QA Engineers help build high quality complex software, as part of a team, through a multitude of different activities, one which is performing testing. And testing doesn’t break software, it provides information/intelligence about the software.
