Recommended resources for encouraging a whole-team approach to testing?

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If you were faced with a tester colleague who regularly made statements along the lines of:

“I think QAs should write all of the API tests, because this task is not for developers”

or:

“On my previous project QAs wrote all of the API and UI tests, we should be doing the same on this project”

… what videos, courses, reading materials etc. would you recommend to them to help them to consider an alternative quality is everyone’s responsibility perspective?

Alternatively, if you weren’t in a position to manage this person or give constructive feedback to their manager, what techniques would you use to help them to rethink their model of quality and/or testing?

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Looking into articles on Modern Testing Principles might help to give you some ideas.

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Thanks, any in particular?

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There is a course on the MoT Dojo, by Alan Page, on the MTP which you might find helpful:

And I recently came across the following article on LinkedIn, hope it’s useful to you:

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My situation is an interesting one, because there’s very little about the project context that is leading this particular tester to adopt a gatekeeper/test-all-the-things approach - every dev is writing automated tests, and as testers we are involved in all aspects of the feature lifecycle from requirements gathering through to deployment. So it seems that my tester colleague (who works for our client, rather than the agency I’m employed by) is bringing their past experience from Waterfall-ish projects and trying to apply it to a context where responsibilities are distributed throughout the product teams and devs take ongoing ownership for the quality/stability of their work.

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It might sound political to say this, then sure , find testers with coding skills who might leave your test team for better paying coding jobs. Why are teams are not “shifting left”, when waiting until a tester gets time to test your API, after it got code reviewed and merged, is costing you on wasted cycles? I’m pretty sure those are not strawman statements in any way. These are things all of us already know though.

Thanks for the link Mickey. You definitely want to present the Alan Page course (get a team pro subscription first), it’s little chunks and runs in just over an hour, but in reality will take much longer to chew.

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QA’s who only believe QA should write tests is wrong. I’ve seen a lot of devs write API & UI tests.
I would look for articles or something about The whole team cares for QA.

I would say that everybody is responsible for quality on the project, if everyone is isolated and only does his or her job. There will be a lack of communication and a crappy handover once someone leaves the team.

I would respond with: “That’s nice” – in a very sarcastic way :stuck_out_tongue:
It doesn’t mean that when your previous project did A and B it will work on your current project. For all means, you are all other people working on the project, you are probably using different technologies.
So if on your previous project you didn’t write unit tests with mutation tests, does that mean you don’t need to do it on your new project? Makes no sense :stuck_out_tongue:

I would try to explain it like this … but ‘in a nicer way’ XD

Mutation testing example: https://pitest.org/

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Do you not find that piranha and shark pools might be helpful?

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Do you not find that piranha and shark pools might be helpful?

Don’t tempt me!

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