Learn to think like a business

[ The Evolving Skill Set of Tomorrow’s Top Testers | Ministry of Testing ]

it is a career-limiting mistake for testers to ignore opportunities to develop a sound knowledge of how businesses operate and the skills necessary to ensure that testing supports business decision making.

 It’s not the job of a tester to make quality-related decisions. That’s what Project and Product Managers get paid to do. Testers should be focused on identifying the business risks that managers need to be making decisions about.

 If lots of bugs are making it to our radar it makes us think that someone isn’t doing their job. What we care about is mitigating risk while delivering a salable product as quickly and cheaply as possible. Time and energy spent dealing with bug reports detract from that goal.

We need information to make high-level business decisions. We need to know “Are we on track to deliver what we promised when we promised with acceptably low risk?”

When times are tight, businesses take more risks. Sure it’s risky to ship software that is under-tested, but it’s less risky than running out of money before anything gets shipped due to the additional time and expense of testing.

Seek to understand what makes businesses successful. Learn to think like a business executive (at least sometimes) when you are testing. Understand business risk management and the reality that as a tester, you are a cost center, not a profit center. No one (in their right mind) wants to have to pay for testing – sure they want the information, but they’d rather not have to pay for it, so you’ve got to make sure that information is valuable in their eyes.

Related: Align conference selection and business strategy, Pragmatic choices of what is important and possible, Look for Minimum Viable Testing , Value of Information for Decisions