© 2004 Johanna Rothman. This article was originally published in Better Software, January 2004. “We have world-class developers, but our testers are second class.” I hate hearing that. Too often, it’s true—and it’s not the testers’ fault. How did things get this way? I’ve been in the software industry for over twenty-five years. I can remember […]
In the last few weeks, I’ve received several questions about how to assess the productivity and effectiveness of testers. I’m concerned about this, because a tester’s effectiveness doesn’t just depend on the quality of the tester’s work, it depends on the quality of the work product the tester tests (as well as the schedule
I ended up in the hospital last weekend (facial cellulitis – yuck). On my floor, we had people who were not too sick, who needed a few days to recover from an acute problem. Everyone’s prognosis was good, and the average stay on the floor was 3 days. Recovering from an acute illness takes
I think of development and test as partners. The developers create product and defects. The testers detect product and defects. They both need to understand what the product is supposed to be and how it’s supposed to work (the requirements). The more the developers explain the architecture and design, the better the testers can
How much time should your project spend on development vs. time on quality? I’ve received a bunch of email over the past year asking me how much time a project should allocate to development and how much to quality. To me, that’s a funny question, because I think of quality as integrated with development. So,
© 2000 Johanna Rothman. This article was originally published in Software Testing and Quality Engineering, March/April 2000. Many of us have worked in test groups in which we felt as if we didn’t have enough time, hardware, or staff to do the work. In those situations it’s hard to escape the feeling that while somebody might be in
© 1998 Johanna Rothman Test managers really serve two very different customers, their testers and corporate management. For the testers, the test manager helps develop product test strategies, and provides test expertise to the testing group. For management, the test manager gathers product information so that corporate management can decide when the product is ready