Is Testing inferior to Development ?

First job , first day of your career ……First half of your training batch (sorted on names) gets Java development and the second half (the half to which you belong ) gets allotted TESTING stream..

To many of you the whole existence ceases .You curse your luck, why is your roll number in the second half. A feeling of disgrace to your talent overpowers you.

HR of the company is approached and bombarded with questions if you can get your stream changed from testing to coding. Long calls are made by you to seniors and friends seeking advice what is to be done next .Some of you feel so disappointed that you quit the present job and look for other opportunities. And a few take it as a compromise, as a job which someone or the other has to do.


But is testing actually inferior to the development?

It is a widely accepted myth that testing is a less rewarding career than development. Both coding and testing are integral and indispensable part of the software production cycle. Coders are like interpreters .They translate the logical requirement into a technical piece of code. Many times it is not required for them to know the entire business domain for which they are coding. On the other hand, the job of a tester may not be very challenging on the technical front; however, it requires great business sense and application knowledge. A good tester needs to understand the entire business functionality to spot any shortcomings in the code.


Taking a very simple example, a coder writes a piece of code to read an input name from the user and match if the entry is present in the database. He may write a code meeting the requirements, but the code may give unexpected results, where the user enters the name in small case instead of uppercase .Such kind of checks are also ensured while the testing of the code.

Testers also get an added advantage when it comes to exposure to the business domain knowledge over the coders. To grow higher up the ladder requires more and more of the domain understanding and less of the technical coding proficiencies. All the directors, vice-presidents of a company are domain experts. Good domain knowledge can be capitalized much more in a B school interview than a technical certification. Besides, testing offers a lot more automation opportunities to save time on any repeated activity. It in many cases offers much better work life balance.

Testing is not a test of patience or a compromise. It is equally, and many a times, much more challenging. CISCO testers are revered in the market for their domain knowledge in networking. Even in companies like ADOBE and Microsoft, testers constitute a big chunk of the total work force and are equally treated.


There are some profiles which are offered to non-engineers and which only involve testing cases and creating excel sheets, but then there is the same number of copy and paste tasks even in the so-called development work. But then creating a test case( however monotonous it may be) is better than copying a piece of code and running it. Isn’t it?

So, if you are in the testing profile, don’t curse yourself and instead learn the most of the business and domain knowledge which will help you immensely in your career, and the next time you hear from somebody getting a testing profile, say congrats to him and ask him to read this article