Quality Does not Belong with
the Tester!
Maaret Pyhäjärvi
Email: <maaret@iki.fi> | Twitter: maaretp
Maaret Pyhäjärvi
Nimeä | Attribution (Finland)
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0/fi/
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0/fi/deed.en

HIGH
EXPECTATIONS

DIFFERENT

FROM BETTER
TO WORSE

Adding a Tester Can Make Things
Worse
• Perception change: from everyone’s work to
one person’s specialty
– Same work twice: the developer and the tester?
– Slap in the developer’s face with different results
• Feedback did not work well with lack of
design & programming skills
– F ear and Consequences of not getting good
enough
• The fixing backlog
– More developer work

Quality and the Developer
• From slap in the face to shared insight of
first experience through pairing
• Learning to think of connected concepts,
not just connected code both before and
after implementation
• Relying on ‘own testing’ and skipping
tester-testing as experiment
• Making testing a programming problem:
automation

Summary
• I’m not responsible for production quality,
developers are
– I help but my efforts are easy to attenuate with
what the developers do
• Working with the culture of collaboration
makes a huge difference
– Experiments with a reluctant team
– Avoiding clear roles keeps everyone alert
– Nobody is “just” something these days