I think that having a specific tester role is not the important part, but to acknowledge the specific skillset required to do good testing. If this skillset is something an engineer, developer or tester has, I think is less important.

Defining that skillset I think is very interesting. Once you have that skillset mapped out, you could use that information to look at what parts of the skillset is interesting depending on specific assignments, so that you get the right person for the right job.

I could however understand someone arguing the importance of the tester role because of the need to highlight the skillset needed to do good testing so that managers don’t hire people with no relevant experience for testing assignments, but I do not share this view.

/Johan

That hardly means test is dead, but is some test dead? In this situation? One could even say that someone who specialized in writing live site monitoring is in a test role – in production, your monitors are often your tests. And I’m sure you know that this certainly isn’t the first time someone has made controversial statements at a test conference on in a blog in order to create a bit of a buzz. Frankly, I’m happy anyone at a test conference talked about something other than the exact same topics that have been on conference agendas for the last decade. I was excited to see the topic of your recent keynote at STPCon, and hope a spirit of debate and new ideas will catch on in future conferences.

But there’s probably even more to this. One technique I use when someone says something I think is wrong, stupid, or even damaging, is to do a bit of root cause analysis on the statement – in other words, I ask myself why they made the statement. In this case, I knew the background (or at least had an educated guess), but the answers are out there now. In the closing pages of the recently released google testing book, James talks about the change in roles at Google – how test roles are now development roles. In his recent blog post on why he left google, he talks about the changes Larry made. I’ve never asked James this directly, but it’s not difficult to hypothesize that the test role was dying at google, and that as a leader in the company, James had two choices: fight back, or jump on the bandwagon. I would suspect that the publicity he got over test is dead was a good move for him. Honestly, if I were Larry, I’d probably do the same thing (at least about what to do with testers). For a pure services company with the monitoring and rollback systems they have in place, it makes complete sense to me. (Note – I don’t know for sure, but I would suspect that the android team still has something resembling testers, but if they don’t, that would explain a lot too).

I’ll probably always be a tester – but what I do will change. To me, saying test is dead doesn’t damage the craft – instead I hope that it inspires critical thinking in those who can see beyond the words and into the meaning. Perhaps those that can’t get beyond that weren’t good testers in the first place…I don’t know. What I do know is that test roles are evolving.

As I ponder how test is changing – and how it needs to continue to evolve, I often wonder if James left off the punchline.

Test Is Dead. Long Live Test.

His talk here (http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/18274418) could lead pointy-haired bosses to believe that testers agree with comments that disparage their own role, like: “It doesn’t matter who does the testing as long as it gets done” or “When I ask someone at Google what they do and they reply ‘I’m a tester’, this is problem employee” or “The minute you start associating yourself more with your role than with the product, your company should fire you immediately.”

I am not the only one who thinks that statements like these about the role of testers actually damages testers in serving the roles you talk about above.

I hope it drives more people to do more ‘counterpoint’ keynotes and blogs (like you’ve just written) about the role of testers.

If that winds up keeping the “Testing is Dead” topic alive enough to kill it properly — with cogent counter-argument instead of just wishing it would go away — then I’ve served my role as an advocate for the role of testers.

Here’s the thing that I’m strongly pondering these days. Why is it that Software is one of few (i.e. I can’t think of another) industry where “testing” is done by “testers”. Everywhere else, there are only “developers/engineers” during R&D, Beta/User Experience Testers during “productization” and QA *if* there is manufacturing/production.

Are we really *that* different??

It would be interesting to try to define and map all the possible (within reasonable limits) different tester roles. It would require a lot of work, and probably not be worth it, but it would be interesting.

Jeff Patton made a good point yesterday at his Mile High Agile keynote. Sports teams don’t have “roles”, they have “positions”. And a person in a particular position will not stop and say “That isn’t my job” if, for example, he is a place kicker but is the last person between the opposing team’s ball carrier and the goal line. I think “position” applies better to software teams than “role”.