the.com/tester
the professional pessimist paid to find the apocalypse before your customers do
means a person or thing that examines something to check whether it works correctly, meets standards, or contains flaws.
from From 'test' plus the agent suffix '-er.' 'Test' comes from Old French 'test,' meaning an earthen pot — specifically the little cupel an alchemist or assayer used to melt and judge precious metals; that in turn traces to Latin 'testum,' an earthenware vessel. So a 'tester' was originally one who put metal to the trial of the pot to see if it was true — and the word still carries that sense of separating the genuine from the dross.
- job title
- breaks things on purpose, gets thanked for it
- mindset
- assumes every button hides a disaster
- famous bug
- first computer bug was a literal moth, 1947
- the math
- finding bugs late costs exponentially more
- secret power
- thinks like the user who clicks everything
software quality assurance — profession that emerged in the 1960s when ibm began systematic software testing
beta tester — volunteers who tested windows 95 before its 1995 release, found thousands of bugs
crash test dummy — standardized dummies used since 1949 by automotive industry to evaluate vehicle safety