Sponsor Love: Should QA Testers be Certified?

By On July 30, 2009 · 3 Comments

It has been a good quarter for crowdsourcing start up uTest:

Expanded software testing marketplace by 30% quarter-over-quarter Acquired 37 new customers, and increased testing community to 18,000 Added application profiling and discussion threads to platform Complete website redesign, adding a human face to crowdsourced testing Won five prestigious awards, incl. [...]

It has been a good quarter for crowdsourcing start up uTest:

  • Expanded software testing marketplace by 30% quarter-over-quarter
  • Acquired 37 new customers, and increased testing community to 18,000
  • Added application profiling and discussion threads to platform
  • Complete website redesign, adding a human face to crowdsourced testing
  • Won five prestigious awards, incl. “Best New Co. of 2009” (Stevies) & Gartner “Cool Vendor”

But while uTest is growing, debate over the need to certify testers is intensifying in the community forums. As a registered tester in the uTest community, I get invited to several projects a month. For example, I was recently invited to a mobile testing project from a high profile client, offering over $20 per verified bug. Should it be ‘first come, first served’ or should certified testers get a priority?

uTest has adopted a neutral stance on the issue, but valid claims are made on both sides of the debate:

In Favor of QA Certification

Quoting testing guru James Bach:

“Most people who do testing for a living donít take classes or read books. They don’t go to conferences. They are not community activists….Yet they may well be able to test software effectively. There is little outreach to such testers by the testing activists. The experience and creativity of most testers is therefore not being harnessed in any systematic way by people making up certification programs.”

“I am aware of no tester certification program that actually guarantees or even indicates the quality of the tester. It has not been my experience that certified testers, of any stripe, perform any better in my testing classes (which include hands-on testing exercises) than non-certified testers.”

Against QA Certification

In the other side, Blogger Michael Bolton (no pun intended) suggests an alternative in his presentation “Why am I not (yet) certified”

In short, there isn’t a single test that is accepted as the standard certification:

  • Does not test a tester’s ability to remember disputed definitions or commonly misunderstood terms, but instead does test a tester’s ability to recognize and deal with potential problems with ambiguity.
  • Does not ask testers merely to name practices or techniques from a memorized catalog, but instead does ask for paradigmatic examples of practices or techniques that might be useful in some context.
  • Does not accept or promote testing as mere validation, verification, and confirming behavior, but instead does support the idea that testing is fundamentally about investigation, discovery, and dispelling illusions.

Have an opinion in this debate? Leave a comment or visit the uTest Forums to weigh in. You are welcome to learn more about uTest’s QA services and crowdsourcing in general, by downloading the free white paper: Crowdsourcing: Eight ways to launch higher quality applications and get to market fast with the crowd.

 
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  • Martin

    QA people are widely mistakenly considered as the “lowest link in the R&D food chain”. Too many people tend to think that anyone can do testing.
    The result is that most products are badly tested, and reach the users full of bugs.
    The common solution is to add more novice testers, thus, increasing the chances of randomly discovering bugs. This also generates massive “noise” from testers who do not understand the product, and who also raise issues that are related to normal product behavior.
    QA and testing MUST be considered as a profession of its own, just like developers. In the same way that no one think of hiring developers who don’t understand the basic of coding, so testers must be trained in testing methodologies.
    In organization where the testers were well trained, the quality of the product was significantly higher.
    [the writer was a project manager in several hi-tech companies]

  • Pradeep

    Certification of any sort, can give an assurance of a minimum skill set required. However, the need for practice always has a higher requirement and custom requirement which cannot be gauranteed by any single certification. Given this scenario, and given the number of people doing this activity, and that only a few have to be used for the job, the option is mainly of the customer and economics of decision making.

    Normally, I have see organization placing trust in certification bodies for a minimum gaurantee. Mostly it is not misplaced, and sometimes it is as the context is to specific. So my answer is that we should emphasize on custom assessments based on project context for specific scenarios based on competency requirements of the job; and if the context is a generic context, we could do with the certification option.

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