Have you ever heard to saying that “Two heads are better than one?”. Well that’s not always true. The quick reason is group think, but we’ll have to get into all that later.

Here’s something that is true. You don’t want the person who wrote the code to also be responsible for testing the same code.

Spread around the QA love. This post goes into 5 reasons why.

5 reasons why the Development & QA task should be done by different people.

Less Things Fall Through The Cracks.

Bugs, by definition, leak out because the programmer didn’t see the bug in their own code. A lot of times it just takes a second set of eyes to see a bug.

Avoid the “I know how this should work” problem.

When something works we tend to keep doing it. It’s easy and more productive that way. “Don’t fix what isn’t broken”, right? So the code is normally exercised the same way.

Adding a second person gives you another set of habits & a good tester will have multiple ‘habits’ to try.

Build Team Product Knowledge (Redundancy).

People git sick or hit by a bus. It’s just a part of life.

If everyone is testing each others code then they’ll have better idea of what’s going on in more areas when the unexpected happens.

Testing is a different skill set.

Testing is a different skill set that some people are really good at. It’s always better to work from a point of strength.

It’s hard to call your “baby” ugly.

Has a friend ever asked you for advice and you’ve had all the answers, but then when faced with the similar problem you have no idea what to do.

A similar thing happens when your asked to correct you’re own work. Let someone take a look without those rose colored glasses on.

Low on testers? Have developers chip in and test each others code.

For a two man crew, just pass things back and forth.

Army of one – shot me an email and I’ll help you out. You could even have friends do some testing, because it’s possible to test without coding skills.

So yes two heads might not always be better then one. Two testers is a totally different story.