I saw this question pop up on Slack and I thought it would be excellent to transfer to The Club as I’ve seen variants of it come up frequently.
How would you sell yourself when someone asks why do we need a tester when they have full stack developers who can dev and test? apart from regular answers like different pair of eyes, testers having different approach to that of a developer, identifying bugs being main priority for a tester etc…
The replies on Slack were:
Depending on the devs’ level of testing skill, I would either sell myself as a quality coach or just become a developer.
When I’m doing development work I’m in a different mindset then testing; it takes mental effort to switch gears
- Being a Quality Advocate, not simply a tester - pushing for quality across the board, asking questions, ensuring good definitions, testing as a user etc
- Exploratory testing, not simply acceptance testing or checking boxes
- Different mindset and role reduces cognitive bias (check it works as I expect, vs. what happens when I do this?, will this break it?)
I’ve seen some really great developers in my time who were very skilled at exploratory testing so I lean towards the quality coach response myself.
What about you? How would you respond?