Sessions

Diversity in team composition

Track: Test, thursday 14:20 - 15:10

A tester is a tester or is it so? Let's have a look at team composition. There are several schools of thoughts on this matter. Along with a strong agile movement come a popular believe that it today is necessary for a tester to have strong programing skills. I do not disagree that programing skills can be beneficial in a test team but there is so much more to it then that. Another example is that many companies require their testers to be ISTQB certified. I se a pattern that we tend to uniform our testers, we want them all to be the same preferable copies of a pre defined role description. Many in the test community has previous claimed that a problem with testers is that we do not have enough or the right skills and that the solution is programing and certifications. What i now see is that we are beginning to lose something precious among us testers, that is diversity. Testing is the art of investigation and searching, we do not know what we are looking for and we do not know where it is hiding. To be great at this we need different skills and a team of diversified testers. We like to be prepared to approach our test object from many different angles and to analyze it's feedback with from different viewpoints. We should not look for unity when composing our test team instead we appreciate diversity and when looking for skills don't forget to look outside the technical area and the most obvious so called testing skills.