Today we talked about Software Quality Assurance, Quality Engineering, and Quality Control.
Some quick thoughts.
Employers create the wrong culture by dividing developers and testers and hiring testers with less experience and paying the less.
General Points of Good QA.
- It should be a rapid tightly iterative process. QA isn’t just done once development is complete.
- Developers should be intimately involved in QA processes, build processes, and in designing and improving QA. QA is development
- QA should be highly automated and systematic. Your QA methods and procedures should evolve and become more extensive, at least as fast as your code base/project does.
- QA is all about managing risk. Product shipment shouldn’t be a trigger action once all test/QA pass.
- QA confidence and measure of risk is directly proportional to time spent in QA verses development. Note time can be concurrent between development and QA
- Transparency from QA teams to Management through engineering is a must.
- Many people make the mistake of empowering QA with declaring a product ready to ship, with out the authority to improve the process or make good risk/time decisions.
- Principles of QA must be understood and exercised by management as well as engineering. Director of QA should be a peer of VP of Engineering not a subordinate.
You get what you pay for and invest in QA.
In the spirit of Technometria’s motto, Engineering/Management Teams get the QA they deserve.
