Changing The QA Role

My first job as a student was in a QA position. I remember I was able to find 30 bugs on a daily basis, so I was considered as a great QA engineer. Years after, I now understand that my superiority was actually reflecting a big defect in the company process, and most of it was because of employees like me - the company had strong QA engineers so developers could count on us and just write bad code.

As a junior developer, I had the habit of checking myself the feature I develop in all stages, even though it was clear that the feature quality in production will be excellent because we have great QA’s. My “habit” of testing my own features, became part of a bigger change of the role of the QA. Our company made that change - no more QA firewalls. The responsibility of the features quality is only on the developers who code it and there are no more “guardian angels”. If you want your feature to work and keep running after 3 months, you must write tests, choose carefully which logic is more important to test, what should be tested as a unit test and should be tested in integration tests.

This change is crucial for fast development cycles in every development center. The developers are the only ones who know best where their features are more fragile and how other features might impact their features stability. If you cannot write an automated test for it – it’s your responsibility to test it manually, so you’d better think on the architecture in advance. QA role should focus more in analyzing analytic, user habits and assure that the quality of the feature specifications is high and that the features are engaging as expected .