e-Talk Radio: Pettichord, Bret, 8 February 2001

reality and on the facts and not on the theory of how it should be working but on what really is working.

Carol: We will be back with more of Bret Pettichord and his insights after these short messages...Welcome back to Quality Plus E-Talk with Carol Dekkers. We are in the midst of show number six where we are talking to Bret Pettichord who is a consultant, a tester, a developer, and he has written an insightful article called "Testers and Developers Think Differently." We have been talking to him for the last half hour just about why they think differently, what are some of the instances. We had a caller who asked and mentioned the gap between the communication between developers, testers, and users. I would like to give out our toll-free number one more time. It is area code (866), that is a toll-free area code, (866) 277-5369. If you are interested in participating as a caller, as a commenter, or as somebody that has a question for Bret. Welcome back to the show, Bret.

Bret: Thank you.

Carol: Bret joins us from Austin, Texas. We have been talking about testers...what is the difference between testers and developers? Bret is in a unique situation having been both, to be able to comment on both perspectives. One of the things that he mentioned just before we went to break is that by managing by fact and doing measurement, that is one of the things that testers do. That testers are really providing measurement. One of the seminars that I did when we were talking about defect and defect tracking and the quality of software that is built. One of my participants who works at Symbol Technologies said, "You know what we do," she said "before we release a project, before we release a piece of software," she said "we track the defects." She said, "One thing that we found to work very, very powerfully between testers and developers is that rather than calling them defects, before the product is delivered, we have renamed them 'saves.' So, we say look at all of the saves that the testers have found and that the developers have fixed before it went to market. If they are found and detected after going to market, those are the real defects." She said psychologically this has really helped Symbol Technologies springboard ahead and actually get away from some of that emotional tug-of-war that happens between developers and testers.

Have you experienced anything like that, Bret, at all?

Bret: Well, that is a new term, I have not heard that one. I have heard endless debates on what they should be called and what they are called. I do not have strong opinions on that. I have one friend who likes to call them "issues." He says it is just an issue, it is something that is brought up. James Bach defines a bug as any concern about quality. I think that is also kind of meant to address the same idea that this is not that somebody did something wrong, but it is just an expression of how we can make things better.

Carol: And it is a discovery process. It is not like the testers put those bugs in. They are there to begin with.

Bret: They are there to begin with. You know, bugs come from all kinds of sources. I think that most people think that the average bug comes in there because some developer did not think straight about something and they made some kind of coding error. But I find