Role Descriptor: Tester

Roles organize the responsibility for performing tasks and developing work products into logical groups. Each role can be assigned to one or more people, and each person can fill one or more roles. When staffing the Tester role, you need to consider both the skills required for the role and the different approaches you can take to assigning staff to the role.

We recommend reading Kaner, Bach & Pettichord's Lessons Learned in Software Testing [KAN01], which contains an excellent collection of important concerns for test teams. Of special interest to the Tester role are the chapters on The Role of the test group and Thinking like a tester and Bug advocacy.

Skills

The knowledge and skill sets may vary depending on the types of tests being executed and the phases of the project lifecycle, however in general, staff filling the Tester role should have the following skills:

knowledge of testing approaches and techniques
diagnostic and problem-solving skills
knowledge of the system or application being tested (desirable)
knowledge of networking and system architecture (desirable)

Where automated testing is required, these skills should be considered in addition to those already noted above:

training in the appropriate use of test automation tools
experience using test automation tools
programming skills
debugging and diagnostic skills

This role is primarily responsible for:

Identifying the most appropriate implementation approach for a given test
Implementing individual tests
Setting up and executing the tests
Logging outcomes and verifying test execution
Analyzing and recovering from execution errors

Assignment Approaches

The Tester role can be assigned in the following ways:

Assign one or more test staff members to perform both the Tester and Test Analyst roles. This is a fairly standard approach and is particularly suitable for small teams and for any sized test team where the team is made up of an experienced group of Tester of relatively equal skill levels.
Assign one or more test staff members to perform the Tester role only. This works well in large teams, and is also useful to separate responsibilities when some of the test staff have more test automation experience than other team members.

Note also that specific skill requirements vary depending on the type of testing being conducted. For example, the skills needed to successfully utilize system load testing automation tools are different from those needed for the automation of system functional testing.