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Comment by giis | Hacker News Reader

As someone who worked as dev (4yrs) later moved as tester (4yrs) and finally returned to dev again.

Here's my personal thoughts/experiences:

- Testing job is underestimated.

- In General, Developers considered superior to testers.

- What makes Tester position difficult is 'repetitive tasks' . Yes you can automated tasks, but you still need to do some tasks that can't be automated. These are manual & repeated tasks, often boring.

- Some developers are so lazy. for ex: while testing we found 'python syntax issue!'

- Management thinks testers can be replaced once they automated everything. Obviously they push for this.

- I know for sure, there are projects with passionate developers but no-one can really take care of their testing side.

- Dev underestimate/avoid unit-tests & rely on testing team to find basic issues.

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Don't blame the devs completely. Not many bosses give out raises or bonuses for good testing. Or even for not shipping bugs. Being a hero and fixing the bug you shipped gets much more visibility and accolades.

I'm not blaming all devs, but most devs :) But i guess there is wide-spread believe with Managers/bosses, testing is secondary to development.

I've seen testers, who find bugs and also fix them but they don't get credits they deserved.

I've noticed that, too. Shipping bug-free software almost hurts your career.

There is a quote out there about how people who put out their own controlled burns get more visibility than those that are sweeping up dead leaves and paper from the factory floor. I can't remember where I saw it or who said it.

That said, I do remember this one: "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." - Ben Franklin.

In the last company I worked, we used people completly unrelated to our field.

They were cheap and since they didn't know a thing about the software, they would mindlessly click through the test-plans and find many bugs.

Problem with them were, that they had a "half-life", when they learned too much, their bug-finds would decrease, because they would get more careful when using the software.

Often we would simply get 2-3 students of a non-technical field and replace them with new ones afer 1-2 semesters.

It depends on the context, but of course developers are considered superior to the tester. That's like saying doctors are considered superior to nurses. If you just look in terms of knowledge required, the amount you need to know to be a developer is significantly higher.

IHMO, thats inaccurate. Here the generalization, is tester can only do 'user-end' point of (black-box)testing. There are jobs which requires tester to do 'white box'. This involves knowledge as well as doing repetitive works.

What I found was, most developers unwilling to do some basic testing for their modules. Even if you find bugs with logs & reproducible steps, they push their dev task to tester again like " can you perform 'git bisect' to find out the patch caused this bug"? or "Can you run 'tcpdump' from your reproducible steps?".etc.

worstcase is sometimes, software 'design flaws' (for example: arithmetic operation software missing division operations) are blamed on testing team for find it later.

I take issue with that analogy. In a modern hospital, doctors and nurses work together - one can't do their job without the other and they have different training and approaches to patient care. The doctor doesn't simply have a superset of knowledge that encompasses everything a nurse knows or is trained to do. So although there might be some strict hierarchy in terms of who is in charge of patients care, it's simplistic and disrespectful to say doctors are superior to nurses.

Source: have worked in hospitals, raised by MDs, have asserted similar things in the past and have been corrected by trusted mentors.

  > for ex: while testing we found 'python syntax issue!'

Do you not at least have CI to run unit tests?!

He claimed he ran unit tests, but later made a small change to the code. Thought its unnecessary to re-run unit tests.

Exact conversion is like 'I tested code & after that made a small 1-line change & looks like missed something, sorry about that, pls don't tell it bosses :P'

I would strongly suggest you persuade the powers that be to set up some sort of automatic testing. It's not difficult to set up and it will save you from so much heartache down the road.

Yes,thats right. This happened few years back while working as Tester.While I was using QA, we focused/worked more on automated testing. Now switched companies & later moved from QA to dev team.

Testers to programmers is like cashiers to cooks at Mickie Dees. I think you are resentful that your job can be automated and thus, the value of what you do is quite low.

Automated testing isn't really a substitute for actually having a person use the application.

Are you suggesting a Mcdick's "cook" position cannot be automated?

I believe the implication is that most of the cashiers will be completely replaced before it is worthwhile economically to try to reduce the number of cooks.

Automats have been around since 1897.

Testers are like McDonalds cashiers. They will eventually assimilate with the self checkout. Now, they may be able to get a job servicing the soda machine if they count their blessings.

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