The Independent Tester

“My testers currently report to the development manager. I’m thinking about moving them into a separate reporting stream with their own manager. That way, they’ll have more clout, and the project managers will have to listen to their concerns.”

Almost since the day designated testers appeared in software development, there has been debate about whether they need to be independent, and just what “tester independence” means. In the past ten years or so, there has been a trend away from isolating testers in their own organization, separated from the programmers. I believe that’s a healthy way forward for our software projects, but it does still leave the following questions open:

• Does a tester need to be independent to be effective?
• What do we mean by “independent”?

Where Do Testers Fit in Software Development?

Our understanding of where testers fit has evolved, most recently through the agile movement’s emphasis on cross-functional teams and collaboration. It used to be common for organizations to expect their testers to hold themselves aloof from what the programmers were doing. This was typically based on a belief that you would only get good testing from “independent” testers—that too-close collaboration would somehow compromise that independence. To foster test independence, those organizations removed their testers from the programmers’ sphere of influence, giving them a reporting stream of their own.

Organizational Independence

At the time, creating organizational independence seemed like a good idea. Managers feared that, without it, testers’ findings would be suppressed or overridden by the development leads they reported to. Testers wanted it, too, not least because they believed that having their own organization would bestow on them the credibility and legitimacy they often found themselves fighting for on projects led by programmer managers or project managers who had been programmers.

Some of those benefits were realized, but I’m not alone in believing that they were frequently outweighed by the negative unintended consequences. Too often, testers came to see themselves as the sole champions of quality in their organizations. Instead of working with the programmers and talking with them about what they were building, testers sat at their desks waiting for frozen requirements to come to them and then didn’t start testing until they got frozen systems. Many testers became gatekeepers—effectively, arbiters of quality—instead of development partners. In some organizations, the testers came to be viewed as obstacles, getting in the way of the development process while adding no real value. Rather than enhancing testers’ credibility, the combination of that view and those tester behaviors sabotaged it.

I’m describing all this as if it were safely in the past, when, in reality, it is still the situation in a lot of places. And, of course, there are many contributing factors. But organizational separation has often reinforced a dysfunctional relationship between testers and programmers, even where it wasn’t the root cause.

All of this goes through my mind when I hear a manager talk about wanting to give her testers “more clout.”