Saturday, September 13, 2008

Don't give your crap to your testers

If you're a developer with any kind of honor or pride what-so-ever, your goal is to have no bugs. And while all software has bugs, the bugs in your code that QA does find, should be so arcane and edge case-y, that they everyone is impressed that those bugs were able to be found.

Said differently, let's say you drop your car off at your favorite shop for a tune-up. How would you feel if your car won't start when you go to pick it up, as if the tune- up had made your car worse and the mechanics didn't notice?

You'd be the indignant kind of mad. You'd think that those mechanics had no sense of pride in their work and didn't care about you the customer.

So how do you think it reflects on you when you give something to QA and in the first 5 minutes, running through the basic smoke tests, the app fails? Do you like like looking like a dolt? Don't you want to be able to find the bugs in your code before they do? Sure you do, because you have pride in your work.

Test your stuff before you give it over to QA. Don't waste their time and yours by giving them stuff that fails on the easy tests. Test their mettle. Make them stretch to find the good bugs because you've already squashed the easy ones.

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