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

[Alex Pounds]

On Wed, Oct 31, 2012 at 07:51:24AM +0000, Najaf Ali wrote:
> 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 maps more closely to Najaf's. I used to work with a small
team that had 1 dedicated QA/Tester role. 2 different people filled it
while I was there, and both of them broke things in tremendously varied &
inventive ways. I think a good tester thinks in a different way to a good
programmer; you can escape all the input you want, and check your boundary
conditions carefully, but a good tester will find the one user setting
only available on your German site that munges your completely unrelated
new feature. It's not a case of "Whoops, I should have caught that." It's
"How did you even think to try that?"

-- 
Alex Pounds 
Web Developer & Photographer

http://alexpounds.com/ | http://ethicsgirls.com/