Testing Activities or a Testing Role?

In the previous chapter, we touched on a few possible models, including business analysts as bookends, doing analysis and testing. Yet, for the most part, so far, this book has been intentionally vague about who does the testing work. We’ve focused on the testing activity instead of testers as people. This expands the role and avoids conversations about generalists versus specialists. If a company has no testers, then everyone is going to do a little testing, which means everyone is going to need knowledge of testing, which increases the need for this book.

It’s time for the tough conversation.

In this chapter, we’ll cover the following:

• The cultural conflict with the testing role
• Building a risk mitigation team (defects and bugs)
• Faith-based versus empirical test automation
• Shift-left and shift-right
• (Actually) continuous testing

Our goal here isn’t to tell you what you should be...