This isn’t a lead-in to a joke. In fact, it’s a very serious question that’s being debated across the software development community. Agile adoption has blurred the historical distinction between testers and developers, and that’s a good thing. When all goes well, developers are testing more and taking a greater responsibility for quality. Testers start designing tests early in each sprint and are constantly in the loop, thanks to colocation and daily standups. If all goes well, fewer defects are introduced into the code base, and the role of tester is elevated from finding the manifestations of developers’ mistakes to protecting the user experience.
However, there’s a great debate stirring about how much testing responsibility should be transferred to developers—and how important it is for testers to know programming.
