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Friday, September 19, 2003 |
Balancing Developers and Testers. Joshua Allen has an interesting post on the changing balance between development and testing resources,
at least at Microsoft. While the general claim that the advent of
managed code has made developers so much more productive that the
testers are now overwhelmed is pretty significant, the really
interesting quote is in the third paragraph: "there is always the
possibility that the ever-increasing test expenditures will not
coincide with a reduction in the number or severity of high-profile
security and quality incidents". To me, that suggests that the skill
set for testers is changing. Now I understand that it's typical for MS
to hire more development oriented types as testers, but in every
company I've worked for, testers tend not to have significant
programming experience and are on the whole less technical than the
programmers. So testers tend to concentrace on UI and HCI
types of tasks and not so much on security analysis. I think that
testing for security would require a technical and likely a programming
background, so I would expect that companies that are concerned about
security would not simply reduce programming headcount, but would end
up moving programming resources from development to testing. In the
end, assuming that companies manage their people efficiently, I expect
that the increased programmer productivity would be a wash, rather than
an opportunity to reduce headcount. [Gordon Weakliem's Weblog]
7:01:32 AM 
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© Copyright 2003 Clarence Westberg.
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