I promise - on my honor as a software tester, with my hand over my heart - I did not break your code because I am the villain in your story. I recognize that you slaved over the keyboard to create a solution to a problem. You are concerned with working software, my concern is its resilience to changing stresses. We both have the same goal of efficient, reliable software in mind, but the path to achieve it may look a little different between us.

The decades-old developer vs. tester struggle is a worn out excuse for lazy communication, or refusing to adapt to Agile environments that require collaboration and understanding between roles. To combat this tired stereotype, I share my top three things that I wish developers knew about testers:

• I wish you knew how much I respect your work. Without the creation and adaptation of software, there would be no need for me to test the changes. Because of you, I have a job.
• I wish you saw me as more than the agent of chaos. In some cases, chaos is required to test the boundaries of a system under pressure. But for the most part, there is a method to my madness.
• I wish you would stop drawing lines between “technical and non-technical” roles. This separation denies that every person in software development plays a technical part in the process. From automation engineer, to manual tester - every skill is developed with training and experience. No single person is more or less valuable than another, because we are all humans in the end.

In this session, I show how the risk mindsets differ from developer to tester, and share practical advice to implement in your teams to foster deeper collaboration between our crafts.

Note for organisers: This is a brand new talk that has never been given. The abstract may change as the content is written. I will contact the organizers with the new version, if necessary, prior to the event.