An ode to the tester

In software development, we talk a lot about velocity. Shipping faster. Automating more. Reducing friction. But there’s one role that rarely gets the attention it deserves, one that quietly holds the entire operation together.

I’m talking about the tester.

Not “testing in production”. Not “QA as a step in the pipeline”. Not “we all own quality” (we do, but let’s be honest: we don’t all act like it).

I mean a dedicated tester. A human whose full-time job is to poke, prod, stretch, twist, and sometimes outright abuse your software in ways you, as a developer, would never imagine.

And let me say this plainly: a good tester is worth their weight in gold.

Beyond the happy path

Developers are optimists at heart. We don’t like to admit it, but we assume the world will behave. We build a feature, run through the happy path, write a few unit tests, try it once or twice locally, and think: looks good.

A tester is the natural counterbalance to that optimism.

Where you see a clean form, they see a dozen questions:

• What if I paste 6000 characters into the first field?
• What happens if my internet drops halfway through?
• Why is the button slightly misaligned on only this screen size?
• Why does pressing “Back” take me somewhere that makes no sense?
• Why does this error message sound like it was written by a robot from 1998?

Unit tests are great. You should write them. But they’re also narrow by design: they check the code you expect to run, under the conditions you expect to happen.

A tester exists for the opposite scenario: all the things you didn’t expect. UX inconsistencies. Weird state transitions. Minor frictions that make an interface feel clumsy. Workflows that technically “work”, but feel wrong. Bugs that only appear on Wednesdays when the moon is full.

Every team has stories of bugs so bizarre or specific that no unit test suite on earth could have caught them. And yet… a tester somehow did.

More than catching bugs

Shared responsibility for quality doesn’t replace expertise. We don’t say, “everyone writes code, so we don’t need developers,” or “everyone thinks about UX, so we don’t need a designer.” Testing is a real discipline. It has craft, methodology, and intuition.

The value of a great tester isn’t just in the bugs they catch, it’s in how they elevate the entire team. They ask questions that expose assumptions and reveal fuzzy product requirements. They don’t just protect quality; they multiply it.

So if you run a software team: hire a tester. A real one. Someone who takes pride in breaking your assumptions before your users break your app. If you already have one, listen to them. Treat them as equals. Because for all our CI pipelines and end-to-end automation, nothing replaces the human who sits down, clicks around, and asks: “What happens if I try something stupid?”

The answer to that question has saved countless releases.

Here’s to the curious ones. The bug finders. The rebels of the happy path. The troublemakers for our assumptions. The round pegs who try every square hole just to see what breaks. While some may see them as blockers, we see genius. Because the ones who are crazy enough to think they can break the system are the ones who make it unbreakable.