While many companies today opt to use dedicated testers for their projects, there are many reasons even the biggest companies in the world continue to work without them. Dedicated testers offer your company the chance to minimise risks and issues with products, but there are ways to launch software successfully without hiring a dedicated tester. By following our top tips below, you can focus your whole team on testing during every stage of their work, which will result in high-quality systems and products that you’ll be proud to release.
Understand your customer requirements
Dedicated testers work to understand the customer’s needs, and by talking to the product owner and business analysts, they offer solutions to the problems your customer may be facing. However, without dedicated testers, you’ll want to ensure you frequently discuss the requirements with your product owners. Everyone in your team will need to have a good understanding of what the product should look like at the end of the process and identify any changes or updates that are needed. An engineer in your team may take over testing if you don’t have a dedicated tester, and oftentimes, this can speed up the time to market for many companies. Engineers understand the real-life issues that may occur and know the best solutions for these issues.
Everyone in your team should be concerned with testing and quality
Sometimes the addition of dedicated testers to a project can result in complacency throughout the process. This leads to laziness and bad habits from software developers, who stop bothering to test whether their code works or the software functions well. They sometimes think they can just complete their part of the project and pass off the problem to a tester. Without dedicated testers, you may find that the quality of work from your developers improves exponentially. They often enjoy their work more and feel their work is more valued within the process. Encourage everyone in your team to work to the highest quality, and you’ll soon find they have more pride in their work.
Understand the end goal
When many developers are working together on their individual part of the project, they sometimes lose sight of the overall goal and bigger picture of your work. Sometimes people simply think that if a system works, it means they’ve achieved the goal. Encourage your developers to understand what the overall project is looking to achieve, so they can work to help everyone within the team achieve their goal. This will encourage them to fix issues as they go and work towards creating a high quality finished product.
Educate your developers about the role of testers
Developers often have the impression that they are far superior to testers, and while their pay may reflect this, more education is needed regarding the role and benefits of using testers. Even if your company opts not to use a dedicated tester, the developers should have respect and understanding for this position. This will allow them to incorporate elements of testing into their work and take more ownership of the issues that may occur. When developers understand what goes into testing, they often improve their development skills as a result of this, stopping issues from occurring in the first place.
Frequently communicate to avoid wasting time and resources
When your team starts working together more closely, they’ll soon begin to recognise the activities your team are completing that aren’t a good use of your time or resources. Whether you opt to use dedicated testers or not, ensure everyone works together well and communicates regularly. In any industry in the world, teams that frequently communicate constantly create better results than other teams who barely speak to each other. When teams don’t discuss their progress, people often start assuming certain aspects of the project are completed, leading to trouble further down the line. When you don’t have testers in your team, you will have to split up their work between you. Take the time to identify which tasks that testers complete are worthwhile to your project, and forget about the other ones.
Developer based testing
Instead of having dedicated testers, many teams are now requiring developers to perform at least unit testing. Others are also required to do further testing, including integrated and automated testing. However, it’s important to remember that this will take up time that could be spent elsewhere, resulting in the slower development of new features. When developers add testing into their coding process, this can make this addition to their workload much smoother and will offer a consistent process that the whole team can be involved with. For this to work successfully, you need to have a very detailed process laid out which everyone can follow. Many developers believe they don’t make any mistakes, but of course, this is where mistakes start to happen when they have that way of thinking.
While testing certainly may slow down the development process for companies, it can often save them enough money on dedicated testers that they think this choice is worthwhile. Many developers out there naturally test their code throughout the process and use coded tests to ensure they are consistently producing the highest quality work. Many developers really don’t enjoy adding this into their work, as they find it to be extremely repetitive or dull. By managing expectations well from the start of a project, you’ll find this may be an option that your company could use instead of dedicated testers.
In conclusion
Dedicated testers offer many benefits to companies, but many businesses are still opting to go without them today. By encouraging good communication and high-quality work throughout the process, you can reduce the risks of working without dedicated testers. Focusing your team on testing throughout the process or assigning this to your development team can mitigate the risks to your systems. This will usually result in products that will be just as high in quality as they would be with a dedicated tester in your team.
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