Haven't blogged for a while as I've been far too busy - lots of people wanting me to test their work and NUnit to learn and write tests in.
The answer to the question I posed in my last blog entry - Am I a tester now ? - still hasn't really been answered. The only programming task I will do from now on will be maintenance of a legacy program once in a while. However I will still be on the 'programmers' payroll as 2 of the board members could not see why they should pay a programmer to do testing ( anyone can do it, right ? ) and still dont understand why testing needs to be done anyway, why cant programmers just get it right, why do they keep making mistakes ?
The answer from my boss - keep me on the programmers payroll and budget
So with that sort of challenge to face then maybe I'm stupid to take it on - and to add to the stupidity...
The ratio of programmers to testers is crazy, 23 programmers to 4 testers and one of those testers would never pass a testing interview. There is a cunning solution though - get some of the support guys to help test. Good idea apart from the fact that unless they have some sort of test plan to follow then they'll randomly click about. So who gets to write the test plans, ah yes the testers so add that to the workload.
The company is also going down the agile route, something I'm all in favour of but it's supposed to mean that coders and testers work closely together. With a deliverable every month that needs testing and the only way to stand a chance of keeping up with that is having some automated acceptance and regression tests which needs programming skills so thats just me and one other tester with those. Add that to the workload
Except we might be busy as a lot of the future developments could be API based with very little UI so nothing for the traditional testers to click on, no spelling mistakes or tab order bugs for them to find. Maybe they could help the programmers with their unit tests seeing as the programmers don't have a testers mindset and only write happy path ones. Ah, no, they wont be able to help as they dont have a programming background. Hello Mr BoardMember ?
Still, at least I'll be financially compensated for taking on the challenge...
Errrrrrr, no - I guess the board members who dont understand testing dont want to be paying top dollar for it, maybe I should be thankful I didnt have to take a pay cut.
Maybe I will have to if my boss cant hide me on the programmers payroll
Remind me again why I am even thinking of taking this one ? Must be something I really want to do or I really am stupid
Dont expect too many more blog posts, I get the feeling I could be a little bit busy... | 