The role of testers

As a CTO, ten years ago, I said, "I pay my testers to find defects". This attitude has since changed.

I now think that when testers are finding defects, then someone, somewhere is doing something wrong. They shouldn't.

Instead, they should:

• establish a "test everything mindset" in the team
• ask the critical questions early on which allow the team to build a high quality product.
• work with the organization and users to guide efforts invested into establishing high quality.
• collaborate within the team to establish both technical and operative means for preventing low quality.
• exercise user empathy to help the team develop a product that doesn't just meet acceptance criteria, but even "feels right".
• take critical looks at the product to see which aspects weren't covered with Acceptance Criteria and identify improvement.

Plus a lot of other things.

And note how the idea of "finding defects" isn't even in there.