What’s the Right Developer-to-Tester Ratio?

It doesn’t matter whether I teach, coach, or assess projects. Almost everyone has this question: “How many testers do we need?” The short answer is enough to be able to assess the state of the product.[46]

Testing is another technique for managing risk—the risk that the product you’re developing somehow won’t meet the customers’ needs or the risk that you can’t get enough testing done to assess the product state. Developers can (and should) certainly perform some testing, but developers are blind to the defects they create.

Too often, managers are looking for some kind of industry standards to justify their claims, so they can influence their senior managers. There are some resources available, ...

Get Manage It! now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.