Testers have long struggled to define their roles, to justify them even, in a world where not everyone really grasps what it is we do. The terms "Quality Assurance" or "DevOps" make us shudder, one with an over-estimate of what we are able to do and the other with a complete denial of our existence as a profession. So we tend to overcompensate, carving out a part of the system development and maintenance process that we can brand our own. Sometimes we call it risk management, sometimes we call it Quality Gates, sometimes we call it simply Testing phases. But it all boils down to one thing: we want to hoard Quality as our own thing.
By attempting to solidify our role we have successfully isolated our role instead, cutting others off from quality, investigation and even curiosity over how their systems work. Don't worry, the Tester, our Quality Hero, will take care of it! No need to worry about it or spend much energy, because if we do, those poor folk will have nothing to do...
In this talk, we'll go over how we've developed this Quality Hero Complex, why it is harmful, and how we can evolve beyond it. We'll cover topics such as the myth of shared skills devaluing roles, hoarder behavior, and transactional knowledge, and give you a guidebook on how to navigate them properly for a better team dynamic.
After this talk, my hope is that you go from developing a learned helplessness approach in your team to sharing the love of quality investigation with your colleagues.