I like a good QA department, but their thinking baffles me.
I’m trying to get this thing to work,
and you’re trying to break it?
QA, along with their own testing, gets input from the customers (who aren't always reasonable...'what do you mean, this software WON'T wash my car and cure male pattern baldness? YOUR salesguy said it would!' .... and feeds it back to R&D.
R&D looks at the input. A third of the time they say "Uh.... yeah, this is software, not a 'car wash' And I dunno about this baldness thing." A third of the time they say "Yeah. That doesn't fit into the current roadmap." (translation: 'This is hard, and I don't feel like doing it.'). The final third of the time, the process works pretty well.
It's fun to watch, from a distance. I'd not want to be in either place, though. :-)
“Breaking” the system is the job of Testing. That’s actually a good thing, because the customer will minimize the number of breaks the user can accomplish.
QA is different. QA independently looks over the paperwork and makes sure all the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed. They make sure that procedure is followed, all development phases are done completely, and [reckless] shortcuts are avoided. They spend a lot of time reviewing software development and test folders, but are not developers. This naturally causes a lot of friction with the actual developers, who tend to look down on the QA folks.
I suppose there are some companies who have consolidated Testing and QA, but I have yet to see that.
I would never take a QA job unless I absolutely had to. It thankless and the worst of all worlds.
Oops...looks like I needed a QA guy for my response:
“Breaking” the system is the job of Testing. That’s actually a good thing, because it will minimize the number of breaks the user can accomplish.
QA is different. QA independently looks over the paperwork and makes sure all the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed. They make sure that procedure is followed, all development phases are done completely, and [reckless] shortcuts are avoided. They spend a lot of time reviewing software development and test folders, but are not developers. This naturally causes a lot of friction with the actual developers, who tend to look down on the QA folks.
I suppose there are some companies who have consolidated Testing and QA, but I have yet to see that.
Would never take a QA job unless I absolutely had to. It thankless and the worst of all worlds. From all appearances, it is actually high stress.