Debugging computer software can be a royal pain in the ass. The section “How Many Eyeballs Tame Complexity” of The Cathedral and the Bazaar really hits the nail on the head. Having a source code aware tester can be very beneficial to the programmer because he/she will be able to tell you what when wrong, where and a couple of possible reasons why. If the tester doesn’t know programming they can only tell you that something went wrong. Most of my experience writing code for regular people to use has been on the web and it is extremely frustrating when an end user reports a bug but describes the problem incorrectly because then the task falls on me to try and recreate the conditions for this error. This can sometimes be very difficult to do if there is only a small glitch in the source code.
