Do Testers need to know how to code?
A common question I’m sure. I’m also sure there are many opinions floating around in relation Testers and coding. My thoughts on this are directed towards the Tester who has just got into the industry and working on their craft. A Tester that doesn’t have a tonne of experience under his/her belt as they are the ones (as I did) most likely to ‘Google’ this question.
If you’ve stumbled across this post after a ‘Google’ search, that’s a great indication that you are thinking about things or at least exploring ways of potentially enhancing your skills as a Tester. When I Googled this topic around two years ago, it was under the context of ‘worry’ in an ever-changing industry. Am I up to scratch? All the Testers online seem to know so much about coding, a lot of technical terms used – a lot of which I don’t understand. If this is how you are feeling, honestly, do not stress it too much. As mentioned above, if you are reading this post after searching around online on the topic, this is a sign that you are a great Tester and are passionate about your craft.
So, with that said, I’d start my answer by first asking how would you define your role as a Tester? Are you verifying that an application does what it is supposed to do against some requirements documentation? Or are you looking at going into automating tests? White box testing etc?
The question of knowing how to code is answered off the back of those questions. ALL Testers however, SHOULD have a good knowledge of how the application they are testing works. I.E, what things/components affect other things/components. What does each component do? This will open so many more scenarios for you when preparing test cases, thus adding that extra layer of quality to the product being delivered.
Understanding how the components work in the application you are testing, can also help greatly when reporting bugs found. You will start to speak in a way that the developers understand. You can also help point them in the right direction for a fix. Additionally, knowing how the application works will also allow you to get an idea of what components of the application will be affected once this fix is deployed.
So, what am I saying? In my opinion, Testers do not need to know how to write code, but they need to know and be very familiar with the application they are testing. Sometimes this means you need not know the ins and outs of the language it’s developed in and other times it requires an understanding of this at the basic level. So it all depends on what you are testing.
In my experience, up until automating our regression tests, I didn’t feel the need to know how to code. I simply verified the application was doing what it should be doing, based on requirements documentation. I would scrutinize the requirements, often finding issues in them, catching them early and when I’d draft my test cases I’d be exploring the various ways I could potentially break things in the applications, however that was limited to what the user would do, nothing too technical beyond that.
99% of my testing during the first 4 years as a tester (you can check how I started here), has been on web based applications which of course hugely influences my opinion on this matter. The value of the most successful application I was involved in centered around the data sets it used in the tool. In order to do the best job I could on the application I had to take a step back. No more basic login permission checks, submitting forms, checking fields etc. I took a step back, spoke to the developers. They mentioned the tool is built using java, and using x y and z data sets. I then spoke to the account manager for the product, to get and understanding of how the users use it and where the value is in the tool. I then concluded the value is in the data sets, and then began to learn about the data and get an in depth understanding of it.
How is it, that my team found issues with the data and graphs after it had passed unit tests and validation by the analysts who are specialists in their languages? Those being SQL and Java. I believe personally that it is down to my team being more familiar with the tool. Again, as mentioned above, understanding the components and how they work together.
To conclude, in my humble opinion, which holds no weight at all in the industry, is that Testers do not need to know how to code but they need to be very familiar with the application they are testing which requires a process of thinking and assessing how the application works. Following this assessment, it may be that you need to learn/grasp the basics of a language such as Java, but even then, you don't need to walk away after as a Software Developer. You have to view the languages used for coding through the lenses of a Tester. You do not need to know how to code, but IF required, you should know how code works.
With that said, there is one major factor that contributes to this issue. You may have read this article and thought 'but James, all of the jobs on the market are asking for experience using the various languages mentioned' - this is true. From my experience, the majority of the Testing jobs on the market demand that applicants have some experience using languages such as Java, Python etc. I think this is somewhat down to the fact that some employers don't actually really know what they are looking for in a Tester. Perhaps they assume that because their applications are built using X language, this means the applicant MUST be familiar with the language in order to do a great job. Again, do employers actually know what they want from a Tester?
My final words on this are, as a Tester, you want to be the best as you can be in your craft, so definitely invest some time in studying object orientated programming. This will give you a high level understanding of how programming/coding works, which can then be applied to various languages. The only real things that change between the languages are a few extra functions and the syntax used for those functions.
I hope you enjoyed the post and I welcome any feedback you may have. You can contact me via twitter @webtesthub - come say hi!
All the best!
@WebTestHub
