Since mid-January Belgian Friday night equals “masked singer-night”; a tv-show where celebrities are hidden inside beautiful costumes, the audience needs to guess who’s inside and every week one “character” is unmasked. This made me think, what about the character “software tester”? The name implies a clear role, but reality is different. A software tester has many roles hidden under its mask, let us explore!
The Masked Software tester
Different roles under the mask
16 Mar
Posted by: Berte Verhoeven
Category: Business
No Comments
The DevQAops
We’ve seen it before and we’ll see it again, customers asking for a software tester that is able to do it all. A versatile tester with a technical background to do analysis, develop test frameworks, add automation tests to pipelines, and monitor performance issues. It’s extra nice to have such a magical mix of roles in one profile: developer, analyst, QA engineer and performance tester. So, they sure deserve a very pretty costume!
The Scrum Master
A common scenario in this act is the following:
- Software tester enters the project
- He/she is involved with all stakeholders of a project, because quality management is done throughout the whole SDLC. So, this “role” is seen as the perfect scrum master back-up
- Starts combining his/her role with the scrum master role
- The end
So, in this case we could talk about a two-faced character then?
“A software tester has
many roles hidden under its mask”
The Product Owner
The main goal of this role is to make the (software)product a success, for the company & the user (obviously). Big surprise, what is crucial for this success? Quality! 🥳
So, a product owner with a software quality background is always a good idea. This person will have insights on what is necessary to monitor the quality of the application throughout the process. Has experience with requirements and is used to “bonding” business & IT. Maybe a costume of a diamond would be appropriate because well… all the above.
The mask falls
On the 18th of March many Belgians will watch this season’s final on television. For our software testers we don’t foresee any unmasking soon. The role/character of a software tester keeps on evolving and will continue to do so because of the digitization and complexity of applications. Knowledge in one specific area won’t be sufficient enough to keep your relevance on the IT scenery. So, our advice, keep wearing the mask of software tester, that won’t go out of style any time soon. But make sure the roles hidden under the mask keep evolving and growing. Continuous learning has never been more important than today, otherwise your mask may fall…
