My Tester's Commitments

My job is to help programmers look good; to support them as they create quality; to ease that burden instead of adding to it. In that spirit, I make the following commitments:

1. I provide a service. You are an important client of that service. I am not satisfied unless you are satisfied.
2. I am not the gatekeeper of quality. I don’t “own” quality. Shipping a good product is a goal shared by all of us.
3. I will test your code as soon as I can after you deliver it to me. I know that you need my test results quickly (especially for fixes and new features).
4. I will strive to test in a way that allows you to be fully productive
5. I’ll make every reasonable effort to test, even if I have only partial information about the product.
6. I will learn the product quickly, and make use of that knowledge to test more cleverly.
7. I will test important things first, and try to find important problems. (I will also report things you might consider unimportant, just in case they turn out to be important after all, but I will strive to spend less time on those.)
8. I will strive to test in the interests of everyone whose opinions matter, including you, so that you can make better decisions about the product.
9. I will write clear, concise, thoughtful, and respectful problem reports. (I may make suggestions about design, but I will never presume to be the designer.)
10. I will let you know how I’m testing, and invite your comments. And I will confer with you about little things you can do to make the product much easier to test.
11. I invite your special requests, such as if you need me to spot check something for you, help you document something, or run a special kind of test.
12. I will not carelessly waste your time.

Inspired by A Tester’s Commitments.