And what is your excuse?

I finally made my way through about 70 blogs.  Many educated me and a few were easily skipped.  It was this one that I found interesting - Top 5 Excuses for not having enough Testers Testing.

My Product is not finished yet:  I agree with the article that this excuse is silly.  The best and perhaps the most important testing happens at the beginning of SDLC.

Quality is everyone's responsibility; No dedicated testers needed:  I very much believe quality is everyone's responsibility and quality is enhanced by having a dedicated tester leading the charge.

We have budget/time constraints:  Oh!  This excuse is so very true.  This is where experienced testers add a tremendous amount of value by executing risk based and Session Based Test Management, SBTM.  In the world of continuous delivery time constraint certainly is playing a more important role in the land of excuses, so creativity and automation are highly valued.

My product is perfect.  It does not need testing:  This one is just laughable.  Hand the team a copy of Perfect Software by Gerald Weinberg.  Honestly it does not take much effort to find flaws in almost every software product today.

A separate QA team can build an 'Us vs Them mentality', which is not Healthy:  I have to admit that I have heard this one too.  And I agree with the article that this sentiment boils down to culture and style.  Agile software teams today should have a set of roles responsible for building great software regardless of the management structure.

I think there may be a couple more excuses floating around.

Our customers will let us know if we have bugs in our product:  This one is very sad, but I think it is true for some web applications.

Revenue is more important than product quality, just deliver it on time:  I think this may be a true excuse for young entrepreneurial companies.

The developers are doing enough testing:  In my opinion you add a great tester to this team it may just be humbling.

I set out to think of 5 additional excuses, but I am afraid I am going to fall two short.  

I think we should all focus on making great software and a little less on excuses.  We are human and yes we all do make mistakes.  I would rather a colleague catch my mistake than a customer.

Happy Testing!