Some tester (usually junior) do minor validation while some experienced tester carry the responsibility of making sure the product match the requirement and additionally, foresee future problem of the implementation or the requirement itself.

What happen when you pay a tester low salary or they are treated like outsiders (most testers are being contracted and treated like their effort are less meaningful to the company), they will be less dedicated in the QA effort.

The bare minimum is achieving the requirement but we the experienced tester know the BA and developer are human and human can’t avoid from making mistake. Hence the experienced tester will be able to tell whether the outcome should satisfy the end user and we are able to advise BA or developers to make some correction before it reach the end user. This not only resulting in better customer/user experience while also reducing effort to fix issues since most of the fixes was done at earlier stage.

But what usually happen is, experienced tester are not treated well even though they do the extra mile of making sure the product not only meet business requirement but also achieve customer’s satisfaction.

So should tester be paid the same as developers or not?
Please start with learning how to appreciate and value your tester’s work and then only you can answer the question.

In my experience both the tester and the developer are responsible for developing good software. Best developers are testing and best testers are coding themselves as well especially successful in BDD. Seeing software development done by different roles (Developer, Tester, Business Analyst, Information Analyst, Data Architects, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Administrators and others) is missing the point of good software development today: everyone is responsible for developing good software based on their skills. The willingness to help other team members despite it might not be the fastest way to achieve the sprint goals this week is key to progress as a team in the long run.