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Managing the Proportion of Testers to (Other) Developers

article
By
Cem Kaner
,
Elisabeth Hendrickson
Jennifer Brock
|
Summary

The authors focused on staffing ratios and related issues for two days at the Fall 2000 meeting of the Software Test Managers Roundtable. This paper is a report of their thinking.

One of the common test management questions is what is the right ratio of testers to other developers. Perhaps a credible benchmark number can provide convenience and bargaining power to the test manager working with an executive who has uninformed ideas about testing or whose objective is to spend the minimum necessary to conform to an industry standard.

The authors focused on staffing ratios and related issues for two days at the Fall 2000 meeting of the Software Test Managers Roundtable. This paper is a report of their thinking.

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Managing the Proportion of Testers to (Other) Developers.pdf
Topics:
development lifecyclespeople managementproject planningteams
About The Author
Cem Kaner

Cem Kaner is Professor of Computer Sciences at Florida Tech. He is senior author of three books, Lessons Learned in Software Testing, Bad Software, and Testing Computer Software. He's also an attorney (a former prosecutor) whose idea of a good time is holding companies accountable for releasing defective software. Work towards this article was supported by the National Science Foundation grant EIA-0113539 and by Rational Software.

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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.

Jennifer Brock

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