[LRUG] Looking for recommendations for a tester on a Rails project

[Ronny Ager-Wick]

Hi, Chris.

I have some experience with this, as I had a dedicated tester while developing 
one of my bigger projects. To be honest, I wasn't too impressed with the 
result. My tester was a remote worker, but I worked with her in the office for 
a while too, and it made no difference.
The issues I discovered was that the tester wasn't a user, and thus had little 
knowledge and interest in the work the users are performing. This makes it 
very hard for this person to use it like a user, and, having more than enough 
just understanding what the real users are actually using the system for, 
somewhat challenging to try something provoking it that may make the system 
fall over. Of course one person is hardly representative. I might just have 
gotten the wrong person for the job, but it did wake me up to the fact that 
testing is actually not easy to find good people for this task. Standard 
testing, as in "we've just made this, and it differs from the old 
functionality the following way, can you test?" was fine, but frankly, that's 
nearly useless testing. If you can describe exactly what to test, then you've 
practically tested it already... I found myself to be the one finding most of 
the obscure or complicated bugs that the developers didn't find themselves. I 
believe it helps a lot to be a developer. We kind of instinctively know what 
can make things blow up... probably because we've done these types of mistakes 
before. And being a software architects I guess helps as well, as we're used 
to understanding use cases. I think most software architects find it much 
easier than the general population to put themselves in someone else's 
situation, imagining how they would use the system. That should be a minimum 
requirement for any tester, but I believe that ability is quite rare.
A tester who can write tests - that would also be interesting! But that 
practically means the tester must also be a developer.

So my advice is then, hire an experienced software architect an/or developer 
to do the testing - if you can find one willing of course... But even if you 
can, that may be a bit expensive.
On the other hand, I've found actual users to be of great value for testing. 
Two-three real users can find an amazing number of issues which we developers 
have overlooked, regardless of how good we are at looking at it from their 
point of view. Preferably pick someone that seem interested in the development 
- typically the ones with lots of ideas for improvement (or lots of 
complaints), and try to get users that do different jobs (if the system does 
more than one thing of course), so you get a representative selection of them. 
However users (non-developers) are often not very good at anticipating future 
issues, possibly because of lack of technical knowledge. They use the 
software, and if it works for them there and then, it's fine with them. But 
I've experienced a few times that I have had a nagging feeling that a certain 
thing is bound to create issues in the future, which users non-devs wouldn't 
even think of, or even argue will *not* create issues. Most of the time, these 
turn out to be issues in the end. Architect/Developer's intuition maybe? 
Perhaps a combination of users and developers would be ideal for testing?

Hope this was at least a bit useful :)
Cheers!

Ronny.


On 30/10/12 07:13, Chris Adams wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> We're looking into hiring a tester to work with us in on a project we've 
> been building for the last 6 weeks or so,  to help catch bugs and issues 
> before they make it to production on a Rails app we're working on at AMEE.
>
> We're working on an app that's fairly well protected by tests, but has a few 
> complex ajax interactions that keep catching us off guard as we develop, so 
> we're looking for someone who is particularly good at ferreting out these 
> kinds of issues.
>
> The app is pretty small, so I assume we'd be looking for someone who might 
> be available on a freelance basis.
>
> However, I haven't really worked with dedicated testers before, so this is 
> fairly new territory for me - does anyone on list have any recommendations 
> of people you've worked with, or any advice on working with testers like above?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Chris
>
>
>
> -- 
> Chris Adams
> mobile: 07074 368 229
> skype: chris.d.adams
> twitter: mrchrisadams
> web: http://chrisadams.me.uk
>
>
>
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