I’ll be your mirror, reflect what you are – The Velvet Underground

Anu Arora is Michael Hunter’s Five Questions With… interview this week. These are really great as it gives different testers’ perspectives to the same questions (even if it is weighted more to MS employees, but that can likely be attributed to his employment there). One thing in particular jumped out at me in Anu’s response. Right at the end she says

I started looking at my job as more then – I am a mere tester, my job is to just show the mirror. I became a quality advocate.

This is the first time I have seen a tester refer to their job as being a mirror, but it is quite appropriate. I believe, contrary to some, that Quality is primarily the responsibility of the developer. If I find a bug, then there was a breakdown in the process somewhere upstream. Would bigger / stronger / faster unit tests have found this? Would having clearer requirements have prevented this? Would static analysis or source code inspection have discovered it?

I suspect this is the part where we start splitting hairs over the definition of someone who does Testing and who does QA. But ignoring that, when you act as a mirror you say things like “I found a couple of these types of bugs this release, if we do X, I think we might be able to catch those before we go through the hassle of an install, etc” or “I notice that your path coverage has decreased, how can I help to get it back up?”. Of course, if you look in the mirror and only see ugliness, you are going to stop looking in the mirror. This is what happens when testers are constantly running with their heads cut off and being abusive to their development team.

That is why it is also important to reflect back the good things your development team does. “Wow, it was hard to find new bugs in that last build” or “Your coverage jumped 15% and your cyclomatic complexity dropped 5. Way to go!”.