Considering whether or not your software company should hire a dedicated team of testers? Here are the Top 5 Wrong Reasons why you shouldn't.

We Have a Beta Program
Some people feel that the best way to debug a system is to ship it to your customers and wait for trouble tickets. I dont know how things work in your industry, but as far as Im concerned, finding new customers is hard enough. I definitely dont want to make matters worse by shipping them buggy software.

Ive spent the last 5 years in the telecommunications industry where the standard for reliability is 5-9. If I even suggested to my customers that my software was in its Beta phase, theyd hang up on me immediately. Im positive the same is true in any industry.

Imagine if I published articles that were not only full of grammatical errors but also missed a complete sentence here and there. Would you bother sending me an email to inform me that my articles are defective? Would you recommend my newsletter to your peers? I didnt think so! So imagine how your customers feel when mission critical software breaks and crashes on them.

Developers Will Get Lazy
Some managers feel that developers will get lazy if they know someone else is responsible for testing their code. Developers are either lazy or theyre not. Someone who takes pride in his work will rigorously test his code regardless of whether or not you have a dedicated team of testers.

If your developers are lazy, dont blame your testers. Blame the developers! Not hiring a team of dedicated testers wont improve the situation. Itll actually make the problem worse because your sloppy developers code will find itself in your customers hand instead of your testers lab.

We Cant Afford Testers
If you can afford testing, then you can afford testers. Basic economics and common sense prove that its more economical and efficient to hire specialists than generalists, as long as you can keep the specialists busy.

If it takes you 50 person-months to develop software, you will (statistically speaking) spend 25 person-months testing and validating it. Which do you think is more economical? Assigning 25 person-months of testing to developers or testers?

As explained in Quality is Job #1, one of my previous articles which lists reasons why software companies should hire a dedicated team of testers, professional QA people are more efficient at verifying software than developers are. Its their job! Keep the 1:3 ratio in mind and hire 1 tester for every 3 developers, even if it means getting rid of your bottom-of-the-barrel developers to maintain a balanced human capital budget.

Testers Find Too Many Bugs
This excuse sounds more absurd than it actually is. I agree that in some cases testers report bugs that are valueless. Enter non-ASCII characters in one field, ASCII in another, stick a screwdriver in your CD-R drive, do the hokey pokey and hit the Enter key, and the system will return an error. Who cares? No customer will ever come across this scenario in a live deployment. (Actually, if I showed you some of the defects our customers are entering in our trouble ticketing system, youd be surprised!!!)

If you think your testers are really finding too many insignificant bugs, give them guidance. Dont ridicule their effort or disregard their problem reports. Explain the use cases youre trying to satisfy and the known (and acceptable) limitations of the system.

We Cant Find/Keep Any Good Testers
I truly sympathize with those who bring up this point because its true. Good testers are really hard to find and the first-class ones often apply to transfer to your product development team. Still, this is not a reason to give up on hiring a dedicated team of testers.

Here are 3 suggestions to keep your testers on your QA team for as long as possible:

• When hiring testers, look for people who have previously held a QA role for at least a year. Beware of new graduates and others who will accept any position to get a foot your organizations door. Chances are more likely that they will ask for a transfer as soon as their probation period is over.
• Offer your testers a competitive salary. Some companies tend to pay their testers way less than their developers. As a result, testers request a transfer simply because theyd like to earn more money, and you cant blame them. Level your pay scales and youll give them one more reason to stay on your QA team.
• Allow testers to develop their technical skills. Give them the opportunity to write automated test scripts, install and configure test networks, and take design/development courses. Providing these extra benefits will entice your testers to stay in their role for a longer period. And when they do decide they want to move to your development team, theyre going to be better prepared.