James Lyndsay: Why Can't Testers Code?

A new testing magazine is accessible online at www.testingexperience.com - congratulations!

James Lyndsay, a British software testing consultant, caught my eye with a challenging short piece called "Why can't testers code?".

The main claim is that there is a growing skills gap between testers and developers, because tester can't code and developers can test. This skills gap pushes testers into manual choirs, while developers write and execute large numbers of high quality test cases, usually on the Unit Test level. Let me add that there is a growing number of sophisticated tools that allow developers to automatically create, run and measure Unit Tests (Agitar, TestNG and Clover are a few examples).

Although in many testing teams this is not the case, I had a live-demo of what James was talking about: a friend called me and said that his management decided to move all test automation activities from the test team to the development team. In James Lyndsay's words:
"this will be a call to arms: your colleagues are doing the interesting parts of your job, and you're rolling over to let them"

I totally agree with James and his call to testers to take back test coding into their own hands. A tester that cannot express himself in code is limited in his capabilities and dependent on others. A tester who cannot code is limited in her understanding of things that can go wrong (and will...) in different application areas. A tester who can't automate will burn-out quickly, repeating again and again the same boring tasks.

We are not a bunch of button-pushers, we are software people, capable of writing testware ourselves.