During a discussion at work today in regard to doing some thorough acceptance testing of the system that I currently work on the topic of who should actually do the testing came up. I remarked that I didn’t think that I as the developer should be doing acceptance testing and a colleague, Russ Taylor, agreed with me and then came out with this little pearler:

Kids don’t mark their own homework

Maybe its a common turn of phrase but I had never heard it before and, to me, it sums up very succinctly my feelings on the matter. I tweeted about it and it got a couple of retweets as well as a slightly different perspective from Bruce Durling who said:

I'm of the opinion that testers should be in the dev team & the dev *team* should be responsible for quality

Bruce makes a good point that testers should be considered part of the dev team. I agree wholly with that and don’t think that point of view necessarily conflicts with Russ’s analogy. Yes, developers should absolutely be responsible for testing their own work – I also think that in the murky world of data integration there is often a need for a 3rd party to validate that work.

Improving testing mechanisms for data integration projects is something that is near and dear to my heart so I would welcome any other thoughts around this. Let me know if you have any in the comments!

@Jamiet