Every single person on this planet possesses a skill set that is unique to the person. From a plumber to an electrician, from a businessman to an engineer, different individuals are proficient in different fields or domains. But this does not mean that a person starts to think of him as if he is alone who is an expert in a particular domain. Similarly, when it comes to the world of information technology, a pool of people are indulged in different sorts of operations and are skilled in their own unique ways. But software quality assurance is something that is a really challenging job. A large portion of the population in the IT sector is playing the role of software testers who are responsible for ensuring the quality of the software products and apps. With this in mind, testers often have misconceptions that the entire organizational growth and productivity is dependent upon them. They are the sole owners of the product quality. They have the power to either make a company’s product a great hit or an absolute failure. And some of these software testers start considering and calling themselves “Master of software quality”.
Product Quality is not just a responsibility of the testers, rather it’s a task that requires the participation of every staff member, be it a tester or not. For instance, if your family wants to improve its living standard and to be happy, a single person can not bring everything to the table but together every family member can bring a lot to the table. Likewise, if you as an organization want to become the apple of your targeted audience’s eyes while gaining a great portion of the market share, you need to focus on the quality side of your product. And to ensure that whether your product quality is up to the mark and as per users’ expectations every stakeholder i.e from customer, requirements, design, development, testing, and support, teams must have equal responsibility towards its sustenance otherwise, results won’t be in favor.
Often organizations completely ignore investing in software testing as they consider it a waste of efforts and financial resources while many firms implement software testing yet they fail to achieve their objectives. They either incorporate the use of software testing tools to assist their testers or else start acquiring services of testing from third parties who consider themselves as masters of software quality. Excluding your in-house product development team and product quality team members from the testing process when you partner with third parties, provides a free hand to your testing partner. They then take themselves as the owners of your product and the real challenges begin to appear. However, this is not the case with every single testing partner yet to some extent it has been observed in the market.
Let’s dig more about the issues that arise when software testers consider themselves as product quality masters or else it’s more appropriate to say “fake masters”.
Developers vs testers – cold war – Relations between developers and software testers do get bitter along the process. Because testers start accusing developers of being responsible for damaging the software product quality and a blame game initiates that end up with major issues. Due to this blame game, organizations have to face a decline in their performance and productivity and a wind of disrespect starts to blow in the organization between development and testing teams. It’s like in cricket, batsman accusing bowlers of having given a lot of runs. If a cricket team has to function well then bowlers and batsmen have to work together to make the team win. Sometimes batsmen fail to perform and other times bowlers.
Blaming oneself for the bugs left untreated – Software testers who consider themselves as the sole owners of the product quality not only take the credits for the fortunes their efforts made but also they get depressed and blame themselves when they get to know the product failed due to some of the bugs left untreated. They think that it’s solely their mistake instead of realizing that a product development life-cycle consists of different stakeholders. You might understand well with this example;
Going back to the cricket analogy, If a team needs 8 runs from the last 2 balls, and the last batsman failed to achieve the score, then do you think it is the fault of those two batsmen at the end? Of course not, the fault is of every batsman who played before them and wasted the balls.
Reluctance to Learning – The software testers who consider themselves as the master of software product quality limits their learning capabilities. They show reluctance towards learning something new and advanced as they think that they are the utmost authority of the product quality and they have learned almost everything. There is no need for them to learn more. Their knowledge, skills, and experience are enough to live their lives as testers, even developers who have the responsibility to develop a product do gather some knowledge from books, etc. Because, in reality, learning is a never-ending process. Those who consider that they know everything are fools and failure is destined for them. The testers who think of themselves as the sole authority when it comes to assuring the quality are just overconfident and overconfidence can lead to massive destructions.
Software product quality masters – Real or Fake?
Concluding the article, we would like to let our readers know that no doubt software testing is a challenging job, and software testers are the backbone of any organization. But this does not mean that testers are considered masters of quality. And even if some testers do think of themselves as masters, then they are making fun of themselves. A family can not be a complete family without a father, mother, and brother. Similarly, software testers are a part of an organization’s family tree but are not the only family members. An organizational family tree consists of many workers like HR, Marketers, developers, coders, and testers, etc. Every member of the different departments is important for the organization’s growth and product quality.
