Dev Vs QA

Statutory Warning:  This post is written based on my interpretation and opinions. The characters in this post are imaginary and does not resembles anyone. If there is any resemblance to any person dead or alive is purely coincidental. I will try to be impartial to any side, though being a QA Engineer  :)

As we all know that there is always a Soft-‘ WAR ‘-E between Developer and QA in a software development industry and everyone has their own role/responsibility to deliver a Quality Product. 

Developer: Software developer is a person who writes programs or codes to develop the applications that does a specific task on a device in short the person who makes the software. Developer job does not end only after writing the code, developer is also responsible for doing unit testing/white box testing in order to ensure that code does works well and does not break the functionality.  Without a developer there is no software device/application.

QA/Tester: Software tester check the software/application to detect the Bugs/failures/errors or unexpected result in feature/software and deliver a quality product in short the person who want to break the software. Without a QA there in no Quality assurance for the software.

The relationship of dev to QA vary from company to company and team to team. In few there is a good relationship among them and in few it’s like a tug of war. I have seen a great difference in the relationship prior to agile and in agile model. In agile, it is more like a team rather than the specialization and it is the team’s responsibility to deliver the planned work in a definite sprint with quality. 

https://goo.gl/bU2Eux

Few conversations of Developer and Tester:

Conversation 1:

• Developer: Hey, why this is marked as a blocker bug and a regression? I don’t see this is a showstopper and how come this is a regression as we have redesigned it?
• Tester: It is blocking the functionality and we cannot proceed further with our testing, this was working perfectly fine previously.
• Developer: But I did not make any code changes in that area
• Tester: I don’t know whether you have made any changes are not but this is working previously
• Developer: We will provide a workaround for this, please bring down the severity
• Tester: Well if the provided workaround works and if we can proceed we will reduce the severity
• Developer: Hey common why didn’t you reduce the severity of the bug?
• Tester: With the given workaround, previous issue got fixed but it is now crashing entire application
• Developer : :( :( 

Conversation 2:

•   Developer: Why you have logged different C.R’s for the same issue
• Tester: No it is not same, I have logged one issue for opening the html file and one for the jsp file
• Developer: This is not issue with the files; it is the issue with opening action, stack trace is also the same then how it will be different. I am sure for the class file also it would be the same
• Tested: Oh is it, I did not test the opening of other files yet, will check and log it separately
• Developer:  now the developer was furious and marked all other as duplicates
• Tester: :( :(

It is essential to have a mutual understanding between them, such that dev helps QA to better understand the requirement/feature and QA helps to reproduce or provides details about the defect/error. There should be a healthy relationship and also should have a competition between them. If there is no challenge, then there will be no winners, and if there is no strong competitor then there will be no motivation to win.

Everyone has to do their part well whether it is a developer or QA, in order to release a better product. To say as in Tollywood style, The relationship between Dev and QA should not be like fish and fisherman, but should be like fish and water ;)