# Testers Make Software Teams Highly Productive

DevFeed: [Testers Make Software Teams Highly Productive](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/testers-make-software-teams-highly-productive-24972.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://codeahoy.com/2017/02/17/testers-make-software-teams-highly-productive/>)

Author: umer

Published: 2017-02-17T00:00:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Code Ahoy - Articles](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/code-ahoy-articles.md>)

Topics: [Testing](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/testing.md>), [bug](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/bug.md>), [DevOps](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/devops.md>), [Exception](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/exception.md>), [Software](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/software.md>), [API](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/api.md>), [Database](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/database.md>), [payload](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/payload.md>), [Network](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/network.md>), [XML](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/xml.md>)

Tags: [api](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/api.md>), [app](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/app.md>), [automated](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/automated.md>), [bug](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/bug.md>), [database](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/database.md>), [developer](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/developer.md>), [devops](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/devops.md>), [exception](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/exception.md>), [exceptions](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/exceptions.md>), [payload](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/payload.md>), [quality-assurance](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/quality-assurance.md>), [software](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/software.md>), [testing](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/testing.md>), [xml](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/xml.md>)

## AI overview

This opinion argues that skilled testers and quality assurance engineers can make software teams more effective by finding bugs, identifying root causes, and suggesting improvements that developers or automated tests may miss. It uses examples involving API timeouts, database initialization, exceptions, XML payloads, and input validation.

## Source excerpt

To put it mildly, developers are not great at testing their own products. Bias, pride, wrong assumptions, lack of time, switching contexts, all play a role in making developers ineffective at testing their code. Most companies, especially startups, don't fully understand the role of a tester. Very early on in my career, we made the mistake of hiring people to be testers who applied for a software developer position but weren't good enough programmers. We paid for it in terms of software quality and over-worked team. It wasn't until I worked with some great testers that I realized how effective and productive software teams become when they have great testers on board. The best testers or quality assurance engineers I've ever worked with weren't developers. One was a DevOps guy and the other was a Network Engineer. They became testers coincidentally because they were very smart and tremendously effective at finding bugs, even when they tested the system as a black-box. They treated the whole exercise like puzzle solving. Here's an example bug report from them: "Found an issue with API to retrieve all widgets right after registering as a new user. Requests kept timing out. Upon digging further, I discovered that the system is throwing NullPointerExceptions. This is happens because the xyz counter in the database wasn't properly initialized in the previous step. Initialize the counter in the previous step and also catch all un-handled exceptions and return an error to the user." Or this one. "Found an issue. The system throws exception when the user selects option 5. I checked the logs and found nothing. I ran wireshark to look at the request and response and found the issue to be caused by developers sending a unicode character in the request. Don't send unicode characters and log error reasons which is field_10 in the XML payload." These bug reports not only clearly identified the issue, but also the root cause and suggested a better course of action, thus refining t