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I don't have much real life experience with project development and testing, apart from small collegeprojects.

During my software engineering lecture, from a bunch of notes, a simple statement caught my eye:

Myths of testing:

  1. I have been put into testing, what is wrong with me?
  2. ..
  3. ..

I was like:

Is this really a myth? Is this not for real? Don’t people in testing team want to be developers? Won’t they think why I am into testing, but not in development? Or people in development are better than me?

Why I think in this way: because after all these years, in the end if I don't get to write my own software, but have to debug other people's code, won't someone be disappointed?

But, on the other hand, maybe I am wrong. It's not just only to sit and debug other's code... There's much more.

Am I missing something?

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closed as off topic by Jim G., MichaelT, Glenn Nelson, Dynamic, GlenH7 Feb 9 '13 at 21:50


I gave you a downvote for criticizing testing as somehow being below developers. –  Mathew Foscarini Feb 9 '13 at 14:41
I recommend rephrasing the question to be specific to a problem, or ask for a response from both sides of an argument. –  Mathew Foscarini Feb 9 '13 at 14:48
@MathewFoscarini you gave him a downvote for asking the question "is testing below dev"? –  gbjbaanb Feb 9 '13 at 14:49
@MathewFoscarini you've been too harsh, just because the lad can't speak proper grammar like doesn't mean he's having a pop at testing. –  gbjbaanb Feb 9 '13 at 14:59
Joey, I apologize if I've been to harsh. Changed my vote to up after your edit. thanks. –  Mathew Foscarini Feb 9 '13 at 15:06
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1 Answer

up vote 9 down vote accepted

Nothing's wrong with testing, and test engineers are well respected people who require more skills than their development counterparts (after all, you have to be able to understand their code, write your own, and manage the testing tooling too).

In the politics of human hierarchies though, testing is seen as less worthy, and testers are seen as un-skilled. this is partly because there are places where a tester is a less-skilled person who is hired to simply run test tools and report bugs, and partly because the developer team will always think their work is so way more important and complicated than anyone else's. (devs, <:rolleyes>)

Testing roles fall into many categories then: there's the unskilled "I pressed button x and it did not work like I expected" there's the more skilled, "I configured the automated test tool to run the script of tests against the product" there's the more skilled still: "I wrote the test rig that ran automated testing for all the components with good and bad data inputs" there's the specialised: "I performed performance, security, or compliance testing against he product".

So you see testing roles fall into many categories (just like everywhere else really, there are junior devs as well as expert developers), which means the question is a little pointless - you have to determine something more specific to the role you have or expect to get a better answer than this one!

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Hmm nice answer +1 :) –  joey rohan Feb 9 '13 at 15:08
Testers require more skills than their development counterparts... hahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha maybe if you live in Internet 2.0 land. Those who can do, those who can't test –  James Feb 10 '13 at 2:29
@James Is that so? –  joey rohan Feb 10 '13 at 12:35
Only a dev would say that. Go and run me a full test suite against your development: I want some unit tests, a specflow test, run finesse on it and fortify, plus DBfit and LoadUI too. Testers at old places always used to be 'tool-running monkeys' but at my new place, they're practically devs who use a different toolchain. –  gbjbaanb Feb 10 '13 at 13:26
@gbjbaanb You must be manager too, trying to assign your job to other people! –  James Feb 13 '13 at 20:26
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