Devs can test

I repeatedly hear the notion that developers can’t test. I’m not sure if this is because we’re protective of our role (testing has been a dying role for decades) or to excuse developers who can’t be bothered to test.

So let me be clear…

Devs can test.

In fact if I had a high risk feature that I needed someone to look at, there’s a few developers that I’d trust more than a tester I didn’t know (and some I do).

I worked as a developer for 5 years. I was alright at it. However, in that time I never forgot how to test. In fact I never stopped testing. Instead of functional test and system testing, I was unit testing and dev testing my code. I was writing documents where I’d identify edge cases and what the behaviour should be… then implementing it. When our tester was on holiday or overworked, we chipped in. The quality didn’t tumble. The world didn’t collapse.

In one of my testing roles, going back over a decade, I was bemoaning that our processes lent towards following test specs when the pass rate was ridiculously high. Instead I’d find the bugs when I wandered away from the defined test cases that I was meant to be executing and started performing what I called destructive testing (ad hoc). I was shocked to learn that the reason why these tests (nearly) always passed was because the devs try and test them first. There were possibly some automated tests in the mix as well.

What I’ve learnt is that when developers, or testers, say that devs can’t test, what they mean is developers would rather focus on writing code. Perhaps they’ve been tainted from only running the boring test specs that drive me mad. Perhaps they won’t invest time in learning about exploratory testing. However, they have to test. They will. They can.

In the coming weeks I’ll share some more detailed case studies on examples of how I’ve seen (& helped) developers perform excellent testing

As quality / testing specialists we should endeavor to include developers in the conversation. We can remain the specialists but with a little bit of support/encouragement, developers can do a solid job of testing. This all helps us build better software and for the dedicated testers, the opportunity to focus on areas where your elevated skillset can add value.

And the next time someone says developers can’t test, ask them if that means quality / testing specialists can’t write code?