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The Enhancing Tester/QA

Still avoiding developers, we continue talking about archetypes

Usually found in the confines of an organization that has heavily silo’d roles and responsibilities, the Enhancing Tester will be assigned responsibility for ensuring the product quality. She believes it is her personal responsibility to question and alter any specifications that were used in creating the software. Since she wasn’t involved at the start of the development cycle, the Enhancing Tester will question the design and requirements only after the development team has passed them on for test. The proposed ‘enhancements’ are usually obscure and with far reaching architectural ramifications. For example, “this really should be an MDI application.”

Since she understands the original requirements, but not the overall business, the Enhancing Tester has no choice but to log these as software bugs so that they will get the attention of the team. After working with her for a few months you will wake up in a cold sweat yelling “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature change!”

Usually, you can counter this by assigning cost estimates to the “bug fixes”. It helps to do so in front of the client.