What If You Don't Have Enough Testers? The previous example solves a problem with additional testers. What if you don't have more testers or the budget to hire them? This is also a dilemma we've faced, with no really satisfying solution. Here are a few approaches we've tried. We think you need at least one experienced tester, who can mentor the "volunteers," to make any of these work. Press a programmer into service as a tester for the duration of an iteration or release. This works okay, but you end up with a programmer who isn't terribly happy and can't wait to get back to writing code. On the plus side, he'll be much more aware of the challenges as well as the value of acceptance testing, and more likely, in the future, to design code with testability in mind. Using a programmer as a tester works best if the programmer "owns" the tester role for that iteration or release. Programmers usually (though not always) want to be more than tester worker bees. If they assume all the tester responsibilities, they're more likely to be enthusiastic about learning more acceptance-testing and quality-assurance skills. Rotate the tester hat among programmers on a daily basis. For the purpose of automating acceptance tests, this tactic works fine. It's basically the same as having someone take on a testing task for the day. However, if XP is new to the organization or the project has criteria that take it outside the bounds of standard XP, it doesn't give the continuity needed for tasks, such as working with the customer to define and refine quality criteria throughout the release. You need a tester who's continuously committed to acceptance-testing tasks. Recruit a nonprogrammer (e.g., analyst, technical writer) into the testing role. If your organization is trying out XP for the first time, you've probably got people in nonprogrammer jobs who have domain knowledge and an understanding of customer needs. These folks requirements analysts, technical writers, or project managers, for example may want to learn the testing role as a way to get involved with XP. A caveat: if the volunteer doesn't have programming experience, she'll need a long time and a lot of help to get up to speed on test automation. |
