October 1, 2008 - Optimistic Developers, Pessimistic Testers

In my experience, developers tend to be optimistic folks, while testers tend to be more pessimistic.

• Developers are creators, with a natural optimism about making new things and solving difficult problems.
• Testers are fault finders, with a necessary skepticism and doubt.
• If developers are the ying, testers are the yang.

I believe this is a good thing, a sort of checks-and-balances tension that makes for better software.
 
But it does lead to some interesting contrasts
 

Optimistic Developer:	The glass is half full
Pessimistic Tester:	The glass is twice as big as required
Optimistic Developer:	This code hasn't yet been tested.  It's not known if it has any bugs
Pessimistic Tester:	This code hasn't yet been tested.  It's not known if it works
Optimistic Developer:	We are 90% done
Pessimistic Tester:	We don't know when we'll be done, if ever
Optimistic Developer:	We will refactor the code to make it better
Pessimistic Tester:	They are throwing out the working code and replacing it with an unknown quantity
Optimistic Developer:	I only changed one line of code
Pessimistic Tester:	The entire system must be retested
Optimistic Developer:	The code is the design
Pessimistic Tester:	There is no design
Optimistic Developer:	We'll fix those bugs later, when we have time
Pessimistic Tester:	We never have enough time to fix the bugs
Optimistic Developer:	This build is feature complete
Pessimistic Tester:	The features exist; some are completely broken
Optimistic Developer:	Anything is possible, given enough time
Pessimistic Tester:	Everything has flaws, and given enough time I can prove it
Optimistic Developer:	Of course it will work
Pessimistic Tester:	It might work, but probably won't
Optimistic Developer:	One last bug fix, and we can ship tomorrow
Pessimistic Tester:	Fixing this one bug will likely lead to two more
Optimistic Developer:	Stop finding bugs, or we'll never be done
Pessimistic Tester:	Stop creating bugs, so I can find them all
Optimistic Developer:	There's no need for more tests
Pessimistic Tester:	Let's just run a few more tests to be sure

Optimistic Developer:	There is no I in TEAM
Pessimistic Tester:	We can't spell BUGS without U