Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Opposite of the conventional wisdom, there is a good reason to have your friends test your work.

The conventional wisdom about testing software it to have someone who does not know you do it. That unknown person will dive into the software and try to find every little fault in it. They are impartial and earnest and all those good things.

Yet there is a good reason to have some of your best friends test your software:

When they do things you don’t expect, you won’t call them idiots.

Those accusations are common in software development. At least I have heard programmers murmer about idiots who report problems with their software. If the testers only knew what they were doing and what they were supposed to test, they wouldn’t report half the problems they report. The programmer then has to answer questions about all these reported errors that aren’t really errors.

If the tester is the programmer’s best friend, the programmer will probably attribute some good will to the reported errors. Of course there is a danger here. The danger being that the tester doesn’t want his best-friend programmer to look bad, so the tester won’t officially report all the errors.

If that is the case, we have discovered what is truly the problem in the software development organization: people are afraid to “look bad.” Appearances are more important than working software that delights the user.

Hmmm, we learned something here, not what we were trying to learn, but something important.

Perhaps I digress. Still, if the testers and the programmers both want the best for the other, things will work out better. Consider that when staffing a project.