Where I work I we have a really awesome testing team and a good process to make sure that they are empowered to be effective and not just squeezed for time or in existence merely so that we may pretend that we test in the name of checking a checkbox on a report somewhere. However, the second-class citizen lifestyle does apply to testers in numerous professional environments where their teams are not treated as if to be taken seriously. If development is to wrap up at the end of August and the project has to be done at the end of October after two months of testing, when the development spills over to the end of September, don't expect the October deadline to move forward to allow the testing team to yet have two months to test in many environments. In these bad situations, the amount of time to test is reduced and the testers are just pinched for time and pressured to bless things. This is sad because I've now seen how awesome the safeguard of a testing team can be when it is allowed to do its job. It's also worth saying that the small businesses that I've worked in which had no testing teams and tried to solve all of their problems with unit tests, pair programming, code reviews, and peer reviews now seem misguided.
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