Better Testing, Worse Quality?

Summary:

If you are lucky, you've never been on the receiving end of a Vice President discovering that a large investment in testing hasn't paid off in improved quality. This article gives an example of how a beefed up test team caused a decline in developer-test practices--with disastrous results. The article describes in detail how the whole team can work better–technically and psychologically–and ultimately ship software with fewer defects.

About the author

Elisabeth Hendrickson

The founder and president of Quality Tree Software, Inc., Elisabeth Hendrickson wrote her first line of code in 1980. Moments later, she found her first bug. Since then Elisabeth has held positions as a tester, developer, manager, and quality engineering director in companies ranging from small startups to multi-national enterprises. A member of the agile community since 2003, Elisabeth has served on the board of directors of the Agile Alliance and is a co-organizer of the Agile Alliance Functional Testing Tools program. She now splits her time between teaching, speaking, writing, and working on agile teams with test-infected programmers who value her obsession with testing. Elisabeth blogs at testobsessed.com and can be found on Twitter as @testobsessed.