[Scott Barber] Software testers

olding that title could be held individually liable, by law, if it were determined that the software he assured did not meet the standard of quality. The image that pops into my head when I think of a Software Quality Assurance Engineer is of someone wearing expensive business attire and a hardhat, holding a clip-board, and sitting at a computer watching code scroll by while marking off list items on sheet of paper labeled "Code Quality Audit."

This, of course, is ridiculous. In reality, very few of us are degreed (let alone licensed) engineers, and I'm not aware of a single instance of a tester being held legally liable for poor quality software. Additionally, with rare exceptions, we don't assure much of anything. (How could we when we neither control the software nor make the release decisions?) Finally, I think it is pretty clear based on the quality of some of the software that you and I pay for, that there are no governmentally enforced standards of quality for most software.

Somehow I don't think weather forecasters have "Weather Quality Assurance Engineer" printed on their business cards. Clearly, weather forecasters aren't expected to either assure or engineer the quality of the weather, yet I regularly encounter people who think that software testers can and should assure or engineer the quality of software. I don't think many people who test software, independent of their title, believe they can predict the quality of the software that will ultimately make it into production any more accurately than a weather forecaster can predict the quality of next Wednesday's weather.

Since there seems to be a prevalent desire for software testers to have fancy sounding titles, maybe we should consider "Software Quality Forecaster" instead. At least that would help our teammates better understand what we really do.

About the author: Scott Barber is the chief technologist of PerfTestPlus, vice president of operations and executive director of the Association for Software Testing and co-founder of the Workshop on Performance and Reliability.