In my 18 years of working in quality engineering and the testing community, I’ve developed some best practices to help organizations create and manage their overall test strategies. This is the first in a 10-week series on what testers wish their CIOs and CTOs knew about testing. Each week, I’ll share my experience to help educate tech leaders on key priorities their testing teams need them to understand. This week, we’ll talk about the user experience.
10 Things Testers Wish CIOs & CTOs Knew About Testing: A Tester’s Job is to Model and Advocate for Great User Experiences
Posted Nov 2nd, 2021
What is the job of a tester, really? Is it finding bugs? Understanding how to code?
Well, sure. But that’s not all of it. Understanding our customers and their business is just as important as understanding how to code or how to find defects. A lot of people will go into a testing career, thinking that their job is to find defects and as a result, most developers, and product people, and even CIOs and CTOs, think that the tester’s job is to find defects. However, without a prioritized way of understanding how the user is supposed to interact with the software, or without understanding how the business fundamentally makes money, then the tester is almost guaranteed to be pushed in the wrong direction, as they try to fight over whether or not they're locating the correct minutiae inside the software, in an area that doesn't matter at all.
I believe modeling and advocating for a great user experience is what all testers should be working toward. Here’s a short video on why.
