What is the relationship between a developer and a tester? Who is responsible for a good software quality?

Success of a project depends on the development team. The working efficiency of the team depends on its individual members and of course on the quality of the relationships that they are maintaining. By a good relation among the team members we mean the team spirit, comradeship and communication between them. All these qualities give rise to a good team.

In a software development cycle the relationship between a program developer and tester is very crucial. Since the two processes i.e., the development of the software system or application and its testing are inter- dependent on each other.

Successful completion of both these processes is crucial to any software development cycle.

POSITION OF A DEVELOPER?

The software developers fall under the following three categories:
1. Computer programmers
2. Software applications developers and
3. Software systems developers

- Software or a program developer as we know is the one who is concerned with the development of a software system or application.
- He/ she takes care of all the phases of the software development cycle.
- His/ her work includes research, planning development, designing and developing the software system or application.
- Sometimes it may also include the facets of testing the software.
- Program developers are at the center of the whole development process and are involved with management of the software project and its programming.

POSITION OF A TESTER
- He/ she is the person involved with the testing facets of a software system or application.
- Their job is to provide the details about the quality of the software system or application to the stake holders.
- He/ she is responsible for executing the software program with the intention of discovering bugs and errors in it.

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DEVELOPER AND TESTER
- The relationship between a tester and a developer should be excellent.
- It is obvious that both the software developers and the software testers work for improving the quality of the software.
- Quality of software includes the design of the software system, actual core implementation, requirements, gap analysis, specifications analysis, development of prototypes, feasibility analysis, documentation, testing, software pre release and post release activities and not to forget the maintenance of the entire software system or application.

But, it is often seen that the relationships between the developers and testers are not so good. This is probably because of the roles of these two.

- Their work often clashes.
- It is obvious that something in the process of development will certainly have bugs.
- It becomes important to decide if this bug is to be left or it is to be fixed. - At this point usually the relationship between the two worsens.
- After all, it is the duty of the testers to identify the bugs in the program.

Matters like these should not hamper the relationship between the developers and the testers as it is crucial for the development.

- Team work and better individual understanding is the best solution for this kind of problem.
- Maintain the quality of software is not just the responsibility of a software tester or developer.
- It is responsibility of the whole development team.
- Therefore every stake holder holds the responsibility for the quality of the software product from the programmer to the customer.

Testers are usually held responsible for the quality sine they are the one who are responsible for finding out the weaknesses of the software and the testers accuse the developers for putting up a bad code. This puts a bad impact on the whole development team since the team spirit is lost.