Development testing, too, requires organisation. The primary test tasks lie with the developers, but responsibility for the test process should be placed with one individual. This may be someone with the role of test coordinator, or it may be the person with final responsibility for the development. It should also be known where support in this area of testing knowledge can be obtained.

In cases of manual execution of unit tests, the choice should be made as to whether the unit test is to be done by the creator of the unit, by a fellow developer or, in the case of pair programming, by a pair. The advantage of carrying out his own test is that the developer has a lot of knowledge of the internal operation of the unit. This is the most efficient way, since no knowledge transfer is required and there are almost no communication overheads. The advantage of testing by a fellow developer is that possible blind spots on the part of the developer are discovered earlier and that the colleague will carry out a more objective test than the developer himself. A variant of this is where the developer executes his own unit’s test, but a fellow developer prepares the test. The above-mentioned choices to be made are also strongly linked to the test strategy.

For the unit integration test, responsibility for the test process may be placed with the application integrator. This application integrator is responsible for the progress of the integration process, as well as for the quality of the outgoing product. Since the application integrator does not have the volume of tasks and responsibilities that the project manager has, the testing, and with that the quality of the test object, gets more attention. The role of application integrator is described in Roles Not Described As A Position.

In development testing, thorough system knowledge and adequate knowledge of testing is required. In practice, it appears that the system knowledge is usually present, but knowledge of testing is often lacking. Ways of bringing this knowledge up to standard are:

• Training courses, in the areas of test techniques and test management and also of testing awareness
• Support and coaching by a test specialist.