I've been working in an agile development environment for a couple of months now and a thought has been niggling away in the back of my mind.
One of the ideas that agile raises is the idea that people are not segregated, or purely responsible for their own silos. The most common scenario I have seen is developers helping out testers. But I have not seen the reverse. I've not been asked, when there is a backlog of development work, if there are any cards I can work on.
So here is my question. Are there any testers out there who can and will take on development work if required? I don't mean automating tests, but actively contributing to a products code base.
Personally, I think it is a good idea, especially for cleaning up small issues (e.g. spelling mistakes) where the time it takes to send it back to dev and have someone else do it is longer than just doing it yourself. The biggest problem I can see is that a tester is never going to know the code as well as a dev. Therefore, knowing which activities it is worth you performing may be a bit tricky, but I do believe it is worth trying.
