With slightly different choices, in a different life I could have been a developer. In fact, I am somewhat convinced that in my next gig, I’ll shoot for becoming a developer with a strong test mentality.
If and when that happens, I might land on a team where there are dedicated QA folks, and in such an event I want to promise something to any tester that happens to work with me. That’s right, I am talking to you tester, the one who is going to help me create awesome features. This post is dedicated to you:
1. I promise to ping you, send you an IM or shout at you when my fellow programmers and I are having a discussion about the design of a feature that you are going to test. I will constantly use this phrase: “Could you guys hold on a minute, I am going to grab our tester, he/she needs to be here”. If you are not there, I will do my best to bring you up-to-speed with any decisions made.
2. I promise that when I think I have a first implementation done, I will go grab you and walk through the code and modules with you, including automated tests. I will ask for some of your time to brainstorm additional test scenarios that we should take into account. I will welcome your feedback.
3. I promise to include you in any code reviews that I create.
4. I promise to sit with you and make sure that you know how to build and install latest versions of the product, as well as how to setup a debugging environment and run any automated tests.
5. I promise to sit with you and create a test mission plan for our feature and divide the exploration between us. I understand that sometimes you will be overwhelmed with other work, and in this case I promise to do my best and create the test missions and run exploratory sessions on my own (despite my obvious bias). I will keep test notes of what I have tried, any assumptions that I have made and areas where I am unsure about some implementation.
6. I promise that whenever I resolve a bug I will include detailed explanation of what was the problem as well as how I fixed it. I will include notes of what I did to verify my changes including manual tests performed.
If I ever do make the jump, and you feel I am not treating you this way, please print this blog post and bring it to me and shove it in my face.
- Federico
This is cool. Thanks for sharing!
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