Modern testers play largely a role of late cycle heroics that often goes unappreciated come review and bonus time. When we find the big bug it is because we were supposed to … that’s the expectation. When we miss the big bug, people ask questions. It’s often a case of ignored-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don’t.

This is going to change and it is going to change soon because it must.

As testing and test techniques move earlier in the process testers will do work more similar to software design than software verification. We will place more emphasis on designing quality strategy for all software artifacts and not just the binary. We will spend more time recognizing the need for testing rather than actually executing test cases. We will oversee and measure automation rather than building and debugging it. We will spend more time reviewing the status of pre-existing tests than building new ones. We will become designers and our work will be performed at a higher level of abstraction and earlier in the lifecycle.
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