Developers and Testers are undoubtedly at the very heart of a software development effort. They constitute majority of the team’s head count. To make things more 'interesting', these two groups are not always amicable. Quite often, they are at loggerheads, for various reasons. An unwritten gospel of software development is that there exists a psychological chasm that separates these two groups – a divide so deep that many teams have failed to bridge, no matter to how many 'team building activities' they are subjected to (which have proven to be superficial).

The False Notion
The reason for such a divide is primarily socio-psychological. Undeniably, there exists a popular notion that development offers a 'better' prospect – one of a higher esteem. Naturally, driven by such a notion, fresh graduates aspire to become developers.

Ego Conflicts
Another fallout of such a notion is that testers who missed out on becoming a developers, vent out their ire on developers (Yeah, Of course, The Grapes are sour!) – whether it is being fussy about trivial bugs or reserving all the complex bugs till the fag end of the release, just to gift developers their nightmare. On the other hand, developers are no exception - that false air of superiority might sometimes prompt them to look down upon testers, only serving to widen the gap.

It is true that developers and testers require very different skills. Development requires one who has good technical domain knowledge, enjoys writing code and technical specs, good debugging skills. On the other hand, Testing demands one who has that innate trait of running into problems with whatever they use, nitpick into the code and dig out those nasty bugs. Emanating from their job profile itself, is the notion that developers are more technical, (mis)leading to the assumption that being more technical is being superior.

Well, the fact is, such a distinction (although, it exists; and the management is reluctant to acknowledge it), is fairly trivial. And, it does come at a price - given that developers spend a lot of time debugging problems (Huh! those late nights, working weekends are more of a developer thing) while the testers are having a life. Also, the compensation package is not so drastically different, making testing all the more attractive – for it is not worth to distinguish such trivial differences from the overall perspective of life! Decide for yourself, what you want to be.