Changing roles of testing professionals in an ‘Organization’

Testers are no longer seen as a 'monkey tester' or 'party pooper' but a stakeholder in successful delivery of application in production environment

1. Testers act as customer and stakeholder representatives.

2. Testers need to demonstrate business understanding, understand customer priorities and market realities

3. Testers are going beyond just protecting the interests of the customer/stakeholders but supporting the development team to build better software.

4. Testers are helping development team stay on track (risk mitigation, building the right things in the right manner, detecting fragility/brittle areas of the application early in the development cycle etc).

5. Testers are increasingly turning aggressive relationship to a collaborative relationship between testing and development teams.

The 21st century organization needs to bring testing upfront in delivery life-cycle to provide rapid feedback, build safety net of automated tests to allow rapid changes in application and involve users early to build the right value tests. To do these they need to invest in multi-skilled testing professionals trained in cutting edge test methodologies. Testers alone can’t bring efficiency in testing. For that there needs to be an increase in collaboration between testers and business experts, testers and developers and testers and end users. Organizations which encourage use of agile methods, and tools and techniques which allow collaboration to happen are more likely to deal with changes efficiently.