Re^2: The purpose of testing

in reply to Re: The purpose of testing
in thread The purpose of testing

I wish everyone would get out of the bad habit of referring to testers and test teams as 'QA'. Generally, we are doing testing. We might be doing quality control. Quality assurance is a whole different animal. Evidently at some point, someone decided the words 'test team' or 'tester' don't sound important enough. I'm proud to be a tester (although ashamed of some in my profession, such as the team described in this post). I work on a team where everyone including the programmers shares responsibility for quality, testing and test automation. We're very happy with the results. As for test teams needing to be 'independent', that's silly. A good tester provides information about the application. It doesn't matter who we report to. We aren't going to be somehow insidiously influenced to not find issues because we have a collaborative relationship with the programmers. More communication and collaboration would go a long way with most projects.

Comment on Re^2: The purpose of testing

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Re^3: The purpose of testing by g0n (Priest) on Oct 18, 2006 at 11:58 UTC
For the record, when I said QA, I meant QA, in the project management sense of the term. In our environment we don't have a separate testing function, developers test each others code (but never their own). QA should absolutely be independent, to ensure that political expendiency cannot override fundamental quality standards. On a different project I worked on (for a different organisation) without an independent quality function, testing could be (and frequently was) almost entirely dispensed with by management edict in order to meet a deadline. The result was disastrous, except for the project manager who was only judged on meeting the deadline, not the quality of the final deliverables. An independent quality function is there to ensure such ill advised deviations from procedure don't happen. -------------------------------------------------------------- "If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing." John Brunner, "The Shockwave Rider".	[reply]
Re^3: The purpose of testing by adrianh (Chancellor) on Oct 17, 2006 at 10:13 UTC
As for test teams needing to be 'independent', that's silly. A good tester provides information about the application. It doesn't matter who we report to. We aren't going to be somehow insidiously influenced to not find issues because we have a collaborative relationship with the programmers. More communication and collaboration would go a long way with most projects. ++	[reply]

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