maramono

Does your team use a dedicated test (non-developer) team? What has your experience been with them? Do they add value? Do you find yourself questioning or being impressed by their skills? Do you use an in-house team or a crowdsourced team (like uTest)?

My own experience has been 50/50.

Some testers are really good and they really like getting deep into the system, learning its intricacies and some are very confortable with code, yet they prefer testing instead of development. These testers show you things of your application that surprise you, and even seem to know the system under test better than you.

But others are really stubborn and seem to want to use the latest fad they learned in the latest testing conference. I discovered that the ones that tend to be bad are the ones that follow three prominent consultants of manual testing: Rex Black, James Bach and Michael Bolton, who really play down all forms of automation, especially BDD.

There are many dimensions to programming languages that range from systems to scripting, weakly typed to strongly typed, dynamic to static typed, purely functional to statefull, imperative to declarative, etc...

There are also very few languages that focus on correctness and contracts to help create programs that have fewer bugs. Yet The mayority of languages simply focus on "getting things done", so to speak, and leave testing and correctness out of the picture or add them later on.

Granted, testing support can be added later via libraries and frameworks, but I wonder: in the continuum of program correctness, is there a language that perhaps does not provide full proof/correctness/contract support but does come with testing right out of the box, either in its implementation or philosophy?

Also related question: do you know of any language that was specifically designed to encourage and/or make testing easier for its programs?

Even though I didn't get the "joke" for a recent post about Go[0], I still think it's interesting to ask.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12371029