To kick off this series, I wanted to introduce why Software Quality Assurance (SQA) testing is important not only for testers to understand, but for developers as well. From my experience, I’ve become familiar with manual testing and exploring different types of automated testing for web applications. I wanted to know a little more about how being a good developer also includes being a good tester and found an article on SimpleProgrammer which reveals the importance of knowing how to test.

John Sonmez, the founder of SimpleProgrammer, says that he “owe[s] a large amount of the success [he] ha[s] had in [his] career as a software developer to [his] background in testing.” I can see why he feels that way, as using just a little more time to double-check what you have created could save you even more time in the long-run. For instance, if something you have spent hours working on seems complete and you do not double-check it and pass it on to a QA team, you have to wait for someone in QA or a testing platform to check it. That could take anywhere between minutes to a few days or more. Once it is QA tested, maybe a bug is found and your task falls back into your hands again.

Could the scenario above been preventable? Yes and no. It is a true that “you can never find all the bugs or defects in a piece of [theoretical] software and you can never test every possible input into the [theoretical] software” but you can try your best. This doesn’t necessarily mean having to do your own end-to-end regression testing through the entire software each time you add a minuscule feature but you should thoroughly check what you have changed and the features directly connected to it.

The article continues to describe common testing forms and what they each mean for developers. Sonmez supports the Agile cycle of software development and describes it in the article as well.

Article: https://simpleprogrammer.com/software-developers-know-testing-qa/

From the blog CS-Series by samanthatran and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.