Now, particularly with agile teams, testers are involved in the process right from the beginning. They participate in functional specification reviews, contribute to user scenario development, design reviews, code reviews, do private buddy testing, help compute metrics like code coverage, and many other quality-related activities. They do not have a sole test responsibility - they are another member of the team. A good tester helps assure quality by finding issues in all aspects of the development process and helps to improve the team's processes to prevent bugs. The best testers find no bugs in the code because they worked to prevent them right from the beginning. As a result, it makes no sense whatsoever to measure a tester by the amount of bugs they report in the bug database.
