Here’s how I think of it. “Specialists” should only be needed for “special” tasks. If you have “special tasks” that span the life of your project and/or span the life of *several* projects, that’s not a “special” task anymore — it’s a *core* task.

Unless we’re talking about unionized labor, I don’t think needing specialists for core tasks is useful (and I’m not passing judgment on what unionized labor is useful *for*).

Specialists are who we should call for short-term, isolated, tasks that no one on the core team has the skills to accomplish to an appropriate degree.

Now, if you want to build a team of generalists who each have different areas of specialization – THAT’S a different story. Take me, for example…

“I’m a software tester. I specialize in performance testing software systems. I also enjoy programming, UI design, networking, data modeling, and business analysis. When I’m not busy doing one of those things, you’ll often find me teaching classes full of other software testers or writing books and articles about software testing.”

David, while I greatly appreciate the fact that you called out Performance Testing (I’d add Security Testing to your list as well) as an acceptable area to call in a specialist, remember that most performance testers got that way by being “expert generalists”. Don’t be afraid to use us as such, so long as you make performance testing our number 1 job (if you want it to actually get done) so that it doesn’t get lost in the other generalist tasks.

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Scott Barber
President & Chief Technologist, PerfTestPlus, Inc.
Executive Director, Association for Software Testing
http://www.perftestplus.com
http://www.associationforsoftwaretesting.org
sbarber@perftestplus.com

“If you can see it in your mind…
you will find it in your life.”