But who really comes out on top in this love relationship?
The Software life cycle consists of working closely in small teams which may indicate a higher ratio of testers to this close-knit team. With the move towards agile working environments it causes developers and testers to work in close harmony. With their daily stand-up they will both assess their progress and see where they are up to working in sync, meaning testers can continually test the product. Whereas, some companies still use the waterfall method with their tester, they have to wait for developers until they get the bulk of their work, this can cause hurried test efforts, slow feedback and even incomplete testing!
What’s the difference?
Software Developers
Software Developers set out to programme the product and maintain the source code in a planned and orderly process. This may include in depth research, prototyping, modification and re-evaluating the coding being used allowing them to deal with this procedure until they meet their perfect match – the testers. Some may say they are the breadwinners of the relationship, earning a higher salary, I guess they are the one creating the product?
Software Testers
There are lots of different types of testing, including: Unit Testing, Automation Testing and Manual Testing. Testers identify the preciseness and quality of the software product. They set out to find the errors allowing it to be checked before the product release. Analysing whether the actual results match expected results and that is perfectly ready to run without any defects. All of this will be under controlled conditions verifying it behaves as anticipated.
So they are essentially looking out for the Developers in their relationship so they don’t make a mistake in front of everyone else – quite romantic if you ask me? But Developers can also dislike the testers as they are trying to point out all the things that are wrong with their product – but without them a broken product would go live and no one wants that!
Depending on whether you are immersed in code and want to be part of the start to finish process of developing this then the developer is the role you need to play in this relationship. If you want to test then you will still be looking at code daily but just trying to find a bug, making sure the software runs perfectly!
No one really comes out on top… as one cannot live without the other!
