Over the past few days, I was working with our test engineer as he was putting an upcoming release through it’s paces. I was feeling pretty good overall but I also knew that we were bound to have a bunch of issues that needed to be addressed before we were in a position to contemplate pushing the update out to production.

As I was sitting at his desk, he suddenly let out this loud Dr. Evil-esque laugh and started adding another entry to his bug list. My internal reaction was a little defensive – “why the hell are you so happy we have bugs?” – but then it clicked – he was happy he found the bug, not happy that we had it. This is exactly what you want. He was trying to prevent us from shipping software that didn’t work.

You’re never going to build perfect software and a tester who loves finding bugs isn’t a sadist, he’s just great at his job. Here’s to sadistic testers – we need more of them.