How does the workflow between testers doing testing and coders doing the coding for pending testing work?

Question

In a large company that does software development, they often have dedicated teams for build management, testing, development, and so forth.

Agile or not, how does this workflow amongst teams work? I mean would the test team write unit tests and then the dev team write code to adhere to these tests (basically TDD)? And then the test team may write tests for a completely different project or have a slight quiet period until the dev team have done their coding. What possible workflows are there?

This is something that interests me greatly. I know that in my current company we are doing it incorrectly (we have 1 tester about 5 devs, which is small scale) but I am not sure how exactly to draw out the ideal workflow. Many (ok, an ex-Project Manager) have tried, but all failed.

Answer 1

If a software tester is writing unit tests then he is not really a tester, he is a programmer. A tester should perform two primary jobs, finding bugs, and finding things in the design that could be done better. Both simply by using the program. A tester might also manage an array of hardware and software configurations for testing against, and perhaps he could, if your program is suited for it, write some automated tests of specific features, as to better be able to test on all those many machines.

A tester can be a lot of different things, how should use yours greatly depend on on what kind of software you are writing, and the skills of your tester.

Do NEVER confuse unit tests with testing, as that is two very different things.