Relationship between a developer and a tester/QA

It’s funny how almost everywhere developers take the tester the troublemakers and vice-versa. Constantly there is a bitterness at some point in the game between these two roles. Wonder why? It’s the genre and responsibility of these two roles.

Naturally, developing something will have bugs. It will depend on the severity, type, and scope of the bug-fix to decide to work or leave out at the moment. At this point in time, situations can get nasty at the debates between these two roles. Of course tester will try to point out bugs after bugs in the test phase. After all its their responsibility.

While the bugs are there to fix, developers get frustrated at the count and even at the person as well. The understanding level between these two roles conflict not only in one place but in many areas. So how to make the relationship between these two good and understanding?

My experience says teamwork is the best solution. It’s the responsibility of both to ensure the ultimate product is working at its best. While the developers should ensure that there are no bugs out of what they develop, the tester’s should ensure that if there are bugs, those should be given, handled at the correct time and scope.

Please notice that I haven’t mentioned QA once but just tester. The reason is either a lone tester or a QA who tests, come in the test phase to do these work. Here is where the role as QA can help the developer to work better not to produce bugs. You see, a tester’s job is to crack down the product as soon as he/she gets. However a QA helps from the beginning to help the developer dudes to advise, point out areas where it’s error-prone. Thus resolving into less amount of bugs. Not only this helps in resolving issues with developers, considering the cost in business perspective is much less and customer is much less edgy than before. Who wouldn’t love to have something bug free right?

So my experience says, when you are a QA, the relationship between you and a developer becomes more friendly. As a team. Together,  you are able to work together in finding defects beforehand which is appreciated always. Not only that, sitting together in a discussion of design, solutions, brings the developer to be aware of the different issues and areas to improve quality; thus taking the quality mind-set a step further.

When you are a tester finding the defects, it’s always good to share some tactics with the devs on how you test. Maybe this will help the devs to test better before delivering the product. But all of this works if everyone is cooperative enough to look in the actual target – to deliver with quality.

To support the phrase ‘Prevention is better than cure’ in SDLC, keep in touch with my upcoming articles.