Picking Raisins

I have had the good fortune to work at a customer where there is a tradition of involving support staff in testing activities. Partly because there aren't a whole lot of dedicated testers, but the benefits extend beyond pure addition of manpower.

In an organization developing a complex system, a lot of roles tend to be filled by domain experts; customers, perhaps, with long experience of using similar systems. It's easy to see how an individual with extensive knowledge of the domain would fit well into the support department or as a product owner, for instance. As a tester? Naturellement.

It might be difficult, I imagine, to find a team of people with good product knowledge and refined testing skills - or at least quite time-consuming to train such a team. So why not simple pick the finest raisins from both cakes (assuming you like raisins .. if not, reverse the analogy) and have a customer-savvy product whiz performing exploratory testing together with a tester who can add fuel to the testing fire in the form of test ideas and techniques. The tester should also take care of documentation - i.e write a session report, keep track of any deviations from the charter and file trouble reports - to maximize their co-tester's play time with the software.

I'm doing just this at my current assignment, and I love it.

Of course, allocating resources from different departments always requires some planning ahead and can be subject to sudden change - but once things fall into place, testing is a breeze. The service-minded contributors have really appreciated the level of steering that the charters provide, and the testers get an opportunity to learn lots about how the product is perceived and used by the customers.