TL;DR

This post tries to answer the question: “What is it that testers do that other people can’t?”

The Problem

Main problem is that other professionals think about testing as a low skill job that anybody can do. Development is much complicated activity, and testers are here just to CHECK what developers wanted to do. Well, it is not so simple because:

• developers very often do not know what they need to do.
• they are very surprised by results of what their code can/can not do.

Explanation

In post Modern testing in an agency setting, author asks simple question:

What is it that testers do that other people can't?"

He concludes that answer is:

More and more I suspect the answer is "nothing", or at least nothing others couldn't do without practice and guidance".

Here is my thought why is this false statement.

In my experience, even with practice and guidance, people can still do poor testing. Because guidance are not checklists. In order to do excellent testing, you must teach META guidance. And with that meta guidance, great testers will create context driven testing techniques ( check lists among other techniques). More on this topic you can find in my previous post: Difference Between Software Testing Technique And Approach In Agile Project.

Testers are the most competent to create meta guidance for software testing teaching.

Conclusion

Example of META software testing guidance are Black Box Software Testing courses or Rapid Software Testing course. I did them both, and it helped me to excel my software testing craft.