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

[Graham Ashton]

On 31 Oct 2012, at 07:51, Najaf Ali <ali at happybearsoftware.com> wrote:

> Just another data point, but I've had a somewhat different experience to Ronny working with dedicated QA. At the one company where this was done we had one dedicated tester per every five or six developers. They had two basic functions for a given user story:
> 
> 1. Make sure that developers had implemented the acceptance criteria.
> 2. Break the shit out of everything.

My experience is similar to Najaf's. I was working in a heavily regulated industry, building desktop applications on top of distributed databases.

At one point I remember we had 1 tester for every 2 developers, and I think that ratio remained fairly constant as the development team grew.

We also TDD'd everything that we could. Back then writing automated tests for GTK apps wasn't an option, so we had to check that the GUI was still hooked up and working manually (from a TDD perspective, I find it interesting that the thin view layer that sat on top of our controllers rarely broke).

We covered acceptance criteria by getting a "customer" to review everything we'd done before we handed it over to the test team. The test team were over worked as it was, so it was important to make sure they were only testing things that solved the users' problems and were likely to make it into production.

The testers' main role was (as Najaf said) to break everything. I found it amazing how bad at that developers really were. The knowledge of how something has been put together severely limits your imagination when trying to come up with failure modes.

That's not to say that developers couldn't quickly home in on lots of things that were likely to fail; we could. We just weren't good enough at thinking outside the confines of how we'd implemented it, and that was what was needed to find the whacky stuff that users would stumble into.

The big difficulty we had hiring testers was finding people who were interested in it. People who aren't motivated to break your app don't do a good job.

You'd think I should be able to recommend somebody. The only good tester I'm still in contact with taught himself to code on the side, then founded a company with a SaaS app that he built in his spare time.

--
Graham Ashton
Founder, The Agile Planner
http://www.theagileplanner.com | @agileplanner | @grahamashton