Good Testers Are A Developer's Best Friend

There's a growing narrative in the software industry that dedicated testers are unnecessary. Some of the reasons given are appealing: "shift left" practices to prevent defects rather than detecting them later, "quality coaches" to educate developers on better testing, and increased integration of testing into automated pipelines, just to name a few.

On the testing side, there's also a lot of shallow, confirmatory work that hasn't helped the case for dedicated testers, and some of the testing camp's arguments aren't particularly compelling. When I was a developer, I found the common "devs don't have a testing mindset" argument, for example, to be downright insulting. There's also a fear of developing a "throw it over the wall" culture where lots of time is wasted going back and forth between separate dev and test teams, with a relationship that's more adversarial than helpful.

In this talk, Caleb will make the case for having dedicated testers closely integrated with developers on a high performing team, and how skilled testers can enhance the effectiveness of developers--not only by helping the whole team learn and improve as defects are found, but by bringing a focus and dedication to testing for the subtle problems that, even with good development practices in place, can still slip through the cracks and require time and deep testing to discover.