What Makes a Good Tester?
Last night, I was invited by Lisa Crispin and Jean-Paul Varwijk to a Potsdam Agile Testers Session (PaTS) at the AgileTestingDays. It was a cool chance to meet friends from the Agile community and to make new ones…
It was an interesting crowd, I was a bit late and didn’t know most of the people (not in real life, anyway). So I sat down, got a beer and listened… There was a list of prioritised topics on a flip chart and one of the discussions went around the question
What Makes a Good Tester?
Many important human virtues were mentioned:
- Curiosity
- Passion
- Communication skills…
Problem Finders
Liz Keogh said in her BDD tutorial at XP2011 in Madrid (she did the tutorial at the AgileTestingDays this week as well):
Testers are problem finders, Developers are problem solvers. That’s why they need each other.
I think that sums it up nicely. Thanks Gaetano for the reference to back up my memory. Nice list by the way!
I have met lots of testers and developers in my career, and I have met very few who have a similar talent for finding and solving problems. What’s your experience?
Problem Solving
Everybody on a good team should have problem solving skills, and surely everybody is able to develop problem finding skills… But there are some people who have this knack of breaking things… And they make the best testers, in my experience..
2 Comments
A journey to #agiletd (1) | Arborosa
November 20, 2011[…] makes a good tester (Nice post on this by Olaf Lewitz); Quote by Michael Bolton: “To see complexity in apparent simple things […]
Helen Wu
November 22, 2011“I have met very few who have a similar talent for finding and solving problems.”
It is an eye opening to hear read the above sentence. Why would there be any difference between testing and coding. Both are requireing the understanding of the problem the code is to solve and the checking whether the code is doing what it is supposed to do. I really want your elaboration of this, please.
Thanks,
Helen