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I was reading the "bad stuff" section and I stumbled upon what he said about the Joel Test: The Joel Test is now considered to be obsolete because it awards po

I was reading the "bad stuff" section and I stumbled upon what he said about the Joel Test: The Joel Test is now considered to be obsolete because it awards points for things like "Do you have testers?" and "Do you fix bugs before writing new code?", which aren’t considered best practices by most devs today. Can anyone explain why having testers isn't considered a best practice by most devs today?

Nursie 10y ago
Damn well should be! Lack of test resource is a huge red flag... Devs should be testing their own stuff too, of course.
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  >>Devs should be testing their own stuff too, of course. Only to check that it's actually working before sending it off to the testers. Unit tests can be a good way to do this. Make no mistake though: a good tester is worth their weight in gold because they will find many "real life" edge cases the developer would not have thought about, as well as UX issues if the feature being tested is user-facing.
lukeasrodgers 10y ago
Not sure, but I believe that part of XP is having devs do more/all of their own testing and getting rid of the developer vs. tester roles (note that this doesn't necessarily mean getting rid of QA), and this aspect of XP is increasingly common. I probably would be disinclined to hire a developer who wanted a different person to write/run their tests, unless it was for a very specialized role and said developer had exceptional talents.
- CodeMage 10y ago
  So, it sounds like the only real change is that we don't call QA people "testers" anymore and have a fancier name for them? Kind of like it's gauche to call yourself a programmer nowadays and we're software development engineers instead?
- NeutronBoy 10y ago
  > to hire a developer who wanted a different person to write/run their tests That's not the role of the tester. The developer should be writing and running their own unit tests. The Tester should be running through user scenarios, use cases, and basically be pretending to be a user of the software to make sure that everything works and makes sense in a workflow (not just in their unit components)

Nursie 10y ago

Damn well should be! Lack of test resource is a huge red flag... Devs should be testing their own stuff too, of course.

enraged_camel 10y ago
>>Devs should be testing their own stuff too, of course. Only to check that it's actually working before sending it off to the testers. Unit tests can be a good way to do this. Make no mistake though: a good tester is worth their weight in gold because they will find many "real life" edge cases the developer would not have thought about, as well as UX issues if the feature being tested is user-facing.

lukeasrodgers 10y ago

Not sure, but I believe that part of XP is having devs do more/all of their own testing and getting rid of the developer vs. tester roles (note that this doesn't necessarily mean getting rid of QA), and this aspect of XP is increasingly common. I probably would be disinclined to hire a developer who wanted a different person to write/run their tests, unless it was for a very specialized role and said developer had exceptional talents.

CodeMage 10y ago
So, it sounds like the only real change is that we don't call QA people "testers" anymore and have a fancier name for them? Kind of like it's gauche to call yourself a programmer nowadays and we're software development engineers instead?
NeutronBoy 10y ago
> to hire a developer who wanted a different person to write/run their tests That's not the role of the tester. The developer should be writing and running their own unit tests. The Tester should be running through user scenarios, use cases, and basically be pretending to be a user of the software to make sure that everything works and makes sense in a workflow (not just in their unit components)