Posts Tagged tester

How do you evaluate testers? A question from StackExchange

I frequent many of online forums. It’s a great way to grow and learn, as the discussions are fantastic opportunities to challenge us with questions we don’t face on our day to day work. I also enjoy the questions that I do encounter in my day to day, because when answering these (or reading answers) for a context different from mine, I discover new ways of thinking about matters I do out of routine.

In English, an interesting site is the Testing.StackExchange” Questions&Answers site. Unfortunately the site is less active than it could be, but there are good questions and very good answers in the list. Names like Alan Page, Michael Bolton and BJ Rollison answer questions there, so it’s a good place for you to ask yours.

This week an interesting question popped at the Testing.StackExchange forum: How can you evaluate the performance of a tester? How can you compare testers’ efficiency?
This is a question that entertains me once a year, when my company does employee evaluations, and my trial at answering it is in this post.
Can you suggest other points of view? What else you recommend to consider? How do you evaluate testers?

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Should/Need Testers know how to Program (a Testing Question from Brazil)

There’s a very active Brazilian software testing discussion mailing list in Portuguese, called DFTestes.
When I say “very active”, I mean an average of 215 messages/month in 2009, and January 2010 has got more than 404 messages. Compared with other mailing list I participate, this is the most active one, and a tip of hat goes to the testers and list-admins that make the discussions interesting and vibrant.

Recently a big argument was held (link in Portuguese, requires registration) on whether “testers need to know programming” or not. I made some contributions to the discussion, and I’ll try to translate my point of view to English here.
Please note that there were a lot of people participating, and the post below does not present the entire debate or even an entire opinion, just the messages I wrote as answers. I hope you enjoy them.

The proposed question was:

Do testers need programming skills? Until a few years ago, most people would definitely answer NO… But I’ve known both people that seek testing jobs as an alternative to coding, and testers that write code routinely. So, do testers need or not to know programming?

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