{"id":451,"date":"2012-05-07T10:20:45","date_gmt":"2012-05-07T17:20:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/?p=451"},"modified":"2012-05-07T10:20:45","modified_gmt":"2012-05-07T17:20:45","slug":"test-responsibility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/test-responsibility\/","title":{"rendered":"Test Responsibility"},"content":{"rendered":"

I apologize in advance for yet another exploration of what testers do. More and more, I feel that Brent is right, and Test is a 4 Letter Word<\/a>, but I feel we (whatever we want to call ourselves) can advance through discussion of our roles and responsibilities.<\/p>\n

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a colleague about team responsibilities. As an exercise, he was trying to come up with a two word action that described what a discipline was responsible for \u2013 the action that you can count on. For development, we agreed quickly on \u2018quality code\u2019. There\u2019s certainly more that a developer does, but given the two word action requirement, I can live with our conclusion.<\/p>\n

The interesting conversation occurred when we discussed test. My initial answer was \u2018provide information\u2019 \u2013 is accurate \u2013 but not the right answer (for me, at least). I love and hate the notion of tester as information provider. We do generate data (and ideally actionable data) as a side effect of our testing, but that description makes it appear as if test has no power or responsibility for decision making \u2013 which I also find wrong. We are not gatekeepers of quality or safety nets, and we\u2019re probably not going to block a release, but I think that testers need to do much more<\/em> than passively provide information.<\/p>\n

My colleague countered with a phrase completely on the opposite end. He proposed \u2018sign off\u2019 \u2013 that the responsibility of test was to \u2018sign off\u2019 on the product (and in order to sign off, we\u2019d generate information, make decisions, etc.) As you can imagine, I didn\u2019t like this description. I\u2019m not against test weighing in on the sign off decision (or any other decision), but I dislike the idea of sign off being the primary<\/em> responsibility.<\/em> (Note \u2013 Catherine Powell has a nice article on the Decision Safety Net<\/a> on her blog)<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t have a great answer yet for the responsibility of test. I like the idea of the role<\/em> of test as an accelerant of quality \u2013 most of what I do has the end result of improving efficiency of and effectiveness of test and development work. \u2018Accelerate Quality\u2019 almost<\/em> works for me, but I can\u2019t say it\u2019s the two word action that a tester should be responsible for. I\u2019ll figure something out, but I\u2019m open for ideas if you have them<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t have a time machine, but I think one positive note from this thought exercise is that I don\u2019t think many (experienced) testers would list the primary action of a tester as \u2018write tests\u2019 or \u2018find bugs\u2019. At least not too<\/em> many\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I apologize in advance for yet another exploration of what testers do. More and more, I feel that Brent is right, and Test is a 4 Letter Word, but I feel we (whatever we want to call ourselves) can advance through discussion of our roles and responsibilities. A few weeks ago, I was talking to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=451"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}