Twitter pointed me to this link http://simplythetest.tumblr.com/post/169623787610/test-developers-arent-testers. In this context, “test developer” means “person writing automated tests and/or infrastructure for automated tests”.
The author’s points are that these are 2 different roles, they have different mindsets, sometimes different objectives, and different skills. Some people can do both, or either, and that’s great, but some people in some organizations think they are interchangeable, and they are not.
Yes, true … but I think there’s more of a continuum than division. I found it interesting that the author seems to think that one person doing both roles is a small-organization thing. Well, I worked for a large-ish company, and when testers were assigned features, one of the deliverables was an automated regression test module for the feature, submitted to and accepted by the regression test team. There was a testing framework (homebrew, but with an actual dedicated support team), so most of the time, building that module was a pretty straightforward programming task. And if we needed something the framework didn’t support, we could make our own local edits to that framework while the framework support team worked on the needed enhancement or fix.
Maybe I see more continuum because of my experience? I’ve been testing telephony servers, and for that, even manual tests usually involve some sort of scripting because you need a tool to make the kind of phone calls you need. (Only occasionally is that tool a phone on your desk – and when it is, it is usually not the phone you use to order a pizza.) So the real question is how much automation is there – run a tool script directly, package the tool script in another script, make a script that both runs the tool script and checks the System Under test for results, or make a program that sets up your test environment and implements multiple test cases (run tool script and check results for each) and reports those results into an archive.
I love finding articles that make me think.