What is a "Test" Person

Lately, I've been thinking about what exactly is a "Test" person...or more to the point a good test person. Someone who is good at testing needs to have multiple skills, good at each but not necessarily an expert in them. The skills needed are Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Systems Engineering. The good test person needs to be good at Software because software drives the test. With tools such as TestStand, NI is trying to make software easier, when in actuality they're trying to make people who don't do software think they can. But if you do software poorly, the tests developed don't work well.

Electrical Engineering skills are needed because that's what is tested and the interfaces need to be understood. Also, the Unit Under Test (UUT) has to be understood well enough to know it's being tested throughly.

Systems are needed to tie the tests together and to understand how the UUT fits into the rest of the system so it can be tested.

A good tester has qualities of each and most are very good in one area and adequate in the others.

I was pondering this as I was trying to understand a test, in TestStand, where the developer used a lot of nifty TestStand features that just made the test harder to follow and understand what was really going on. I think the person who wrote it understood Systems really well, knew hardware well enough to use it, and knew a lot of the details of software without being that good at developing software that will need to be maintained by others.