Who wants testing?

Basically, there are 3 types of people who want testing:

1. customer;
2. company;
3. project manager.

However, why do they want testing? Or why do they need testing?

Customer
Practically, there are 2 reasons why customer needs testing. That is,

1. to ensure business objectives are satisfied by products;
2. to minimize risk from deploying products or changes into production.

Therefore, delivery projects are required to ensure the following:

1. required features are provided by products;
2. required features are working as per expected;
3. required features are delivered in time and within budget.

To achieve the above objectives, the first and second objectives require testing while the third one could be achieved by project management.

Company
Company refers to people who runs the company or in charge of selling products of the company. In general, there is only one reason for them to request testing. That is,

1. to gain advantage in market over competitors.

To achieve this objective, the company needs to gain confidence from the market that:

1. the products can help customers to achieve business needs consistently;
2. the company can deliver what customers need consistently.

Again, both testing and project management are required to achieve the first objective while the second one could be delivered by project management.

Project Manager
There is only 1 reason why project manager requires testing. That is,

1. to ensure products are acceptable by customers.

Again, for products to be acceptable by customers, testing is required to ensure:

1. required features are delivered by products;
2. required features are working as per expected.

Others
Some people may suggest that developer also wants testing. It is absolutely clear that testing by developer should be part of the overall testing strategy. However, testing is very often blamed by developer to stop or delay their delivery of software to customers. Therefore, it is obvious that there are mixed emotions within developer towards testing. Most important of all, they don't really want testing when they come under pressure to deliver. Unfortunately, this is always the situation for developer.