Rarely does a job description say that if your colleagues hate you, chances are - you are doing your job perfectly. That is the case with testers – an echelon of stoics, ready to suffer for the sake of quality of the final product. They are the Spartans of software development.

Testers are the vanguard of development process and simultaneously stay behind the scenes. What are the goals of QA testers and what do they do to deserve the reverence of management and the tough love of developers?

When the quality of the product is above all for the company – it tries to get the best people to test everything

On the frontlines

When ordering a database solution from a company like Tentacle Solutions, one may wonder why they employ people specifically to break things that they build. They’ve already got wonderful developers – they surely can “just produce” something, why would you need to test it?
In a good software development company, developers and testers work towards a single goal?—?a high-quality and bug-free product. They are equally responsible for the final solution. However, since testers are solely responsible for catching bugs and stopping the bug-infested databases from being released. There are two, very common situations that QA teams find themselves in: the tester has found a bug or the tester hasn’t found a bug.

In the first case, they prepare a bug report and ask the developers to repair the bug. Some say they do it out of pettiness and enjoy the energy programmers emanate when they get a headache while solving a particularly difficult bug. (That last part is definitely not true.)

The latter case requires the tester to change the testing environment, managing expectations, and a lot of other variables, to at least prove that your tester’s machine won’t be the only one where that database works properly.

The more tests are performed, the more experienced testers involved, and more bugs found – the lower the risk that there will be critical errors in the final product. That is enough to make managers of both the development house and the client-side ecstatic – instead of putting out unnecessary fires, they can manage their companies and bring profits.

What it takes

When the quality of the product is above all for the company – it tries to get the best people to test everything. For example, Tentacle Solutions hires top young graduates with software development degrees and fast-tracks them through their testing department.

Surely enough, it takes time and effort to train top-notch testers, and it takes lots of time to actually test the database software before deploying it. It requires precise planning and careful management. But the end result - a hand-tailored solution that works like a charm, satisfying all of your company’s needs – it is well worth it.