“QA. Friend or foe?”
There are many who believe the QA element of software delivery is unnecessary, costly, and time-consuming.
Inexperienced project managers will often look at trimming down testing time when their project starts hitting up against deadlines.
That’s absolute madness.
Defects found before go-live is invariably less costly than post go-live, in terms of budget, but more crucially – user confidence. which will impact adoption rate.
I view QA as an absolute necessity for the quality of any project delivery.
The above question is a standard interview I learned from a technical architect I used to know.
What a great question.
A team where the technical bods value the contribution of QA, and can jointly work together to deliver outstanding software is gold.
Testing is not about finding fault and blame and pointing fingers.
It’s about making sure that what we create is robust, and does what we say it’s supposed to do. Properly.
If the client demands that we reduce QA resource because of cost, then I make sure that they know the implications of that cost cutting measure.
QA is not a luxury.
It is an absolute necessity.
Skimping on QA is like… buying a car without seat belts*.
Just.. wrong.
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*Feel free to suggest a better analogy, but that was the best I could come up with!
#dontskimponqa
#zenhaoprotip