December, 20208 IN MY V EWCHANGING THE TESTER DNA - FROM TESTER TO SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT ENGINEER IN TEST (SDET)The roles of testers in enterprises are well defined and embedded in enterprise wide policies and frameworks. Based on the background of the resources or the type of testing they are most knowledgeable of, testers are divided into different teams or departments per role having different responsibilities or authorities: system integration testing, business or user acceptance testing, functional test automation, API automation. These departments were created under the cover of "segregation of duty" or "for audit reasons". Interestingly enough, unit testing has been assigned to the development team which in turn might have led to not focusing on unit tests when talking about quality insurance. Inadequate unit test coverage is the result of this and a deep divide between development departments and test departments. Attributable in part to the above-mentioned separation but also to the fact that resources for the functional and business tester role have been recruited from the ranks of application support agents or business users, technical skill set within these test teams got diluted or even eliminated.Today's appetite for a quick time to market, frequent changes while not compromising on quality has the test department managers facing a dilemma in how to deal with this: on the one hand they cannot afford to lose the application knowledge gathered over years within the department, on the other hand they must satisfy the need for technical resources. To solve this dilemma, we must create awareness and willingness within the test team to build new skill sets or to rebuild what has been lost over the last couple of years. The first step is Bernd BornhausenBY BERND BORNHAUSEN, SENIOR MANAGER QA, TD INSURANCE [NYSE: TD]
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