old-blogs/new-testing-blog/what-is-a-tester.md

What Is A Tester

Last time, we talked about what a test is, and what sort of skills would be necessary to craft and execute effective tests. This time, we'll be discussing how this skillset is embodied. Namely, what constitutes a tester?

There seems to be three different senses in which we can consider this question:

1. What sort of person is a tester? What kind of character does he have? What is his psychology?
2. What kind of role does a tester have within the organization of the software development team? What differentiates her functionally, from her development, design, and product colleagues?
3. What activities does a tester engage in, and what skills are required for those activities?

The third sense is the sense I referred to in the previous post (What is a Test?). .

Tester Mindset

How the tester sees himself, and how he interacts with the world around him, is a complicated question. Depending on the context and circumstances, the effective tester is any one of six different people.

The Scientist

• Anthropologist, Psychologist, Technician
  • Hypotheses & Experiments
  • Inference / Induction are the main mental tools.

The Explorer

• Tracker, Surveyer, Investigator
  • Synthesis from disparate and varied information channels
  • Intuition / Heuristics

The Skeptic

• The Mythbuster
  • Analysis of claims
  • Deductive / Reductive
  • Cognitive bias and logical errors
• Trust but verify
  • Listen, but always compare it with reality.

The Reporter

• What kind of information: Quality
  • Context
  • Currency
  • Consequences
  • Relevance
• How much information: Quantity
  • What is "enough"?
  • What is "too much"?
  • What is "too little"?
• Narrative as a selection tool
  • Bias influences

Advocate

• Product Advocacy
  • When Bias Is Useful
• Customer Advocacy
  • Testers as users

The Engineer

• The Continuous Improvement of testing
  • Automation, and its uses
  • Tester as software vendor