Test Planning

Bonnie Bailey describes how assembling a great software testing team isn’t just about finding the right players; it’s also about reforming or perhaps weeding out the not-so-great players. Squashing certain negative traits found on the team (or preventing those traits from entering the team in the first place) is vital for everyone’s success.

Linda Hayes explains that while there is no meaningful relationship between how many developers you have and how many testers you need, there is an unavoidable correlation between how well your developers test and how much is left to testers. The most reliable way to measure how many testers you need is to treat each project as a unique case.

While collaboration has measurable benefits—faster issue resolution, better understanding of the product and its features,load sharing of team responsibilities (in systems such as kanban)—it also introduces ambiguity around the team members' roles and responsibilities. Of specific interest to us here is the boundary around a tester’s role and its delineation from a developer's role.

Testers who question their own technical ability have more to contribute to technical tasks than they realize because such tasks often don’t require as much technical ability as they think. Bonnie Bailey explains that growth comes through trial and error and plenty of reorienting around dead ends.