Definition of Tester


By the term tester, we mean a person who not only develops and runs tests but has quality assurance and development skills as well. Testers spend a portion of their time actually testing, but they also help customers write stories, and they define acceptance tests and take the lead in automating them.

We're combining what would traditionally be described as both quality assurance and quality control activities. The classical distinction between these two is that quality assurance (QA) aims to avoid the introduction of defects in the first place, and quality control (QC) aims to detect defects that have already been introduced. QA is process oriented; QC is product oriented.

While this distinction is useful for manufacturing, it's less so for software, and our experience has been that either activity alone is generally useless. In any case, XP tries not to overly classify people, because to do so implies that they alone are responsible for coding, testing, analysis, and so on, when XP is all about integrating these activities.

If you're used to thinking of a "test developer," "quality analyst," or "software quality engineer," please mentally substitute your own term for ours. We're using "tester" mostly because it's short, but also because it's an instantly recognized term among software teams. Usually followed by "Oh them."



Testing Extreme Programming
Testing Extreme Programming
ISBN: 0321113551
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 238

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