Software Test Engineer or Software Tester
There’s a big difference between a software tester and a Software Test Engineer. The choice you make can be critical to the success of your software development project.
Testers run test cases and give you a thumbs up or down as to whether the software worked. That’s fine and works fine in some cases (perhaps 10% of real world software development scenarios).
Test Engineers, on the other hand, plan, design and conduct relevant test cases while showing you exactly what is broken and why.
Sometimes testers are a good fit for your needs, and sometimes they’re not.
And here’s a little known fact. Testers can inadvertently kill a project because of their limited capabilities.
Eventually you will need to make this important distinction. The following discussion will help you make the right choice.
A Recipe for Success – Move Beyond ‘What’ and Understand ‘Why’
When you don’t want any analysis with your testing, testers are fine. If you use testers only, however, your development engineers will eventually have to spend extra time to backtrack and figure out why the test failed.
With basic testers, the “why” and “how” pieces are missing – and that adds to your workload and the workload of your developers. Someone on your team has to figure out all of the details and then circle back to the testing team once adjustments are made to the code.
When you want to move beyond a simple pass/fail paradigm – and really improve the quality of your software, you need to enlist the help of Software Test Engineers. Test Engineers help you understand the problem and work through it more efficiently. They save you and your developers hundreds of man-hours of guesswork and trial and error exercises.
Don’t be Deceived by Titles
A lot of companies think they’ve hired Software Test Engineers when, in fact, they’re using testers. To make sure you know which one you’ve hired, ask yourself some questions:
Do your Test Engineers bring analysis and interpretation to the table? No? Then they’re testers.
Do they deliver defect reports plus enough information to actually fix the problem on the spot? No?.. again, testers.
With a Test Engineer, you can answer these questions in the affirmative.
Test Engineers help you understand what went wrong and how to fix it. That’s just not in the tester DNA – they’re a simple binary filter for pass/fail.
| Testers | Test Engineers |
|---|---|
| Run test cases and tell you which ones don’t pass. | Learn your application, find gaps in the requirements, design the coverage needed per your quality goal, write test cases, organize them into suites and then run them so they can write defect reports that your developers can immediately take action on. |
| Tell you when your test cases don’t work anymore. | Keep their test case suites updated to match the application’s changing functionality. |
| Testers run as many test cases as they can to get test coverage. | Compare their test case suite to their functionality matrix to make sure that the right areas of the application are being tested at the right time – and then measure how much coverage they have. |
How to Eliminate Delays, Worry and Project Failure
As you can see, there’s a big difference between these two different roles, and it has a huge impact on how quickly you can get your software released.
If you haven’t guessed already, TESTCo uses Software Test Engineers exclusively. We’re committed to doing a highly-professional, thorough, time-saving, money-saving job when it comes to your software testing.
The way to accomplish this is to build the right team from the beginning, eliminate guesswork and fix it right the first time.
There’s no need to put up with service that delivers anything less. Don’t make the mistake of hiring testers and then putting up with them. All you’ll do is complain, move on to other testers, hope for improvement and then make the same mistakes.
What you deserve is optimized software development and quality… as soon as possible.
A Software Test Engineer allows you to deliver on that promise. Just check out what our clients have to say about it.
Experience the Difference a Software Test Engineer can Make
We’re happy to speak with you about your testing project for software, mobile app, or website. TESTCo is flexible enough to handle small on-demand projects, and on-going QA outsourcing initiatives.
