Beautiful Testing

QA Is Not Evil

There is a faction among software testers that strongly resists having the term quality assurance applied to their work. These testers do not want to be associated in any way with “quality police” functions such as maintaining handoff procedures and quality gateways and other obstructive practices that have their roots in factory floors and assembly lines, but which are historically associated with the term software quality assurance.

But testers are uniquely positioned to be facilitators of good process. Testers are sometimes the only members of the team, for instance, that are acutely aware (before release, at least) of any mismatch between the software requirements and the software implementation. Testers are often the members of the team most widely read on the subject of software development practice. Testers are often the members of the team with the best understanding of the overall state of the project.

The thing about great movie directors and great bandleaders and great critics is they are great only to the extent that they are appreciated by their colleagues and by their audience. This is the classic mistake of traditional software quality assurance work: those workers appointed themselves the arbiters of quality on software development projects without any support from the teams they worked with or from the users who needed the software. In an aesthetic software development process, QA work is about guiding the software development process to increase success ...