Modern testing for modern stacks

I used to work on testing Insurance domain where initially they would assign around 60 to 80% of development effort to testing. Gradually I saw it getting reduced to less than 60%. One of the reasons was probably since the company moved from client server to web based architecture the fixes could be moved faster. Regarding the reasons, you don't have testers I too don't agree that bugs are because of lazy programmers. When I did some coding for automation I felt the natural urge was to get your code working and make sure happy paths passed. The urge after that would be to complete other tests rather than testing your code with all possible scenarios. I feel the way people see things when they develop and test varies a lot. We need testers to test for all scenarios, also it will add one more person looking at what you have developed. The whole product lifecycle has shrunk after the agile and CI process, release cycles are faster. Roles of testers also have varied. Testers now have to use automation to test faster. That doesn't mean you can automate everything. Still the process to understand the application and figuring out what to test and where to add automated checks has to be done by good testers. I also like the point made by Sumeet as more hardware and IOT devices come into the picture more testing would be required as it's not easy to replace or update hardware.

This article was written in 2000 and a lot of changes have happened in software testing since then. I do not agree with the norm that atleast one dedicated tester is needed for every two or three programmers. Depending on the software needs and factors such as time-to-deliver you may decide upon testers requirement. But I strongly believe that there should be a dedicated testing team for testing a product before it is made available to public. Earlier testers role were limited to functional and automation testing but with the evolving trends in DevOps world, we as tester should be capable enough to play a combination of roles likes business analyst, a mini data scientist, an Ops trouble shooter, or a developer. Beyond testing scripts and automating everything, testers need to have multi-functional skills. So I feel the type and nature of testing we do is changed a lot, we are using many tools, many new testing methods have changed. Testing has become more interesting and complicated now.

A well written article with few funny lines in between. He's given good examples which has made it easy to read. I like some of his suggestions, not completely convinced on hiring non-traditional workers.

A well written article. Although it was from 2000, so things are changed drastically when we look back 17 yrs back. It was hard to believe that many companies did not have testers at all. But today, QA is equally important as of Dev. In Agile Methodology, QA play very important role right from day 1 of SDLC.

Many companies still think that. That is why they don't have testers. But this is also a fact that "Lot of companies release lot of products with a lot of bugs". And "They fail to survive in this world of exceptionally complete products."