The need for having development/programming knowledge for Software Testers.

In this blog post, I am going to write about the need for having basic development knowledge for Software Testers.

I have worked as both Programmer and Software Tester. So, I think I will be the appropriate person for writing this blog post.

When I worked as Programmer/developer, I used to see many Software Testers who used to create poor test strategy due to their poor programming knowledge.

And, it may be difficult to set up proper test environment without having proper programming knowledge.

Assume that a Software Tester is going to test a Web application. If something goes wrong while doing his testing, he should be able to report the issue clearly by mentioning whether the error is happening from client (i-e browser) side, network connection or server side. It will help the developers to fix the issues quickly.

For doing this narrow down, the Testers should know what is Client (webbrowser), how the server works and how internet is working.

He should know how to see the client side error messages.

Reproducing the issue also need some kind of development knowledge.

Being familiar with SQL and handling databases will help to test back end part of the web application. It will help to load some prerequisite data also to save testing time.

Test data collection task can be done easily if the Testers knows little bit programming.


I am planning to write more articles about the ways for providing development knowledge for the Testers. If you are interested to read them, you can subscribe. (It is free)


The recent Agile development model is trying to reduce the gap between Software Development and Software Testing.


So, I believe everyone will agree that it is very important to have programming knowledge if you are going to be a Software Tester.


Now, we can see how we can give basic programming knowledge to the Software Testers.

- Development Team can arrange session for giving overview about the development for the Software Testers.
- Software testers can start reading very basics of programming and web development from w3schools.com
- Testers can participate in code review meetings.



Ok. This blog post has explained the importance of having programming knowledge for the Software Testers. Similarly, it is important to have Software Testing knowledge for the programmers. I will write separate blog post about providing Software Testing knowledge for the programmers.

And, if your company is going to implement Test driven development, then it is important to have close interaction with the Development Team. This interaction will be effective only if the Software Testers are having some fundamental programming knowledge.

You can join the discussion about this post here.

And, you can share your view thro' the comments.

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