The QA Department Mindset

From this post by Rands, titled “The QA Mindset”:

At the current gig, there’s no QA department. […]

My concern is that the absence of QA is the absence of a champion for aspects of software development that everyone agrees are important, but often no one is willing to own. Unit tests, automation, test plans, bug tracking, and quality metrics. The results of which give QA a unique perspective. Traditionally, they are known as the folks who break things, who find bugs, but QA’s role is far more important. It’s not that QA can discover what is wrong, they intimately understand what is right and they unfailingly strive to push the product in that direction.

I believe these are humans you want in the building.

At my current job, we don’t have a QA department either. And like Rands, I wasn’t comfortable at first. I’ve worked on teams without QA, but an entire company without a QA Department? I’ve certainly had questions about the use of a QA department, but does that mean they are a bad idea?

Yes, and this line in Rands’ defense is why:

Unit tests, automation, test plans, bug tracking, and quality metrics. The results of which give QA a unique perspective.

I am a staunch believer of “building quality in.” Every bug that slips out is a failure of your development process. The way to higher quality is not to find, or fix, more bugs. It’s to avoid them in the first place.

If you rely on QA to champion unit testing, automation, bug tracking, and quality metrics, your development process is lacking its most important tools and measures to improving quality. Quality can’t be imposed by QA, it must grow out of enabled and engaged development teams.

I have a saying: “Don’t hire to fix a problem.” If you have a quality problem, hiring a QA department isn’t going to fix it. You instead hide the systematic problems that cause quality issues in the first place.

This is not to say “the QA mindset” isn’t valuable. It is. One of my best hires was Bjorgvin Reynisson, who was a Test Engineer at Nokia and I hired as a QA Engineer at CCP. He was embedded with the graphics engine team and he helped them develop extensive automated correctness and performance testing systems. He worked with them to recognized holes in their process and test coverage. He helped with tracking issues and increasing quality. This is the “QA Mindset” I treasure, and this type of person is invaluable to development teams. Bjorgvin unlocked a latent “culture of quality” in the team he was a part of.

I contrast this “QA Mindset” with the “QA Department Mindset“. The QA Department Mindset has two damning characteristics. First, it is innately adversarial, as Rands notes.

Yes, there is often professional conflict between the teams. Yes, I often had to gather conflicting parties together and explain[…]

Second, it is by definition a separate department, which creates obstacles to better integrating engineering and QA.

Bjorgvin should be spending time with his teammates and the rest of the developers figuring out how to improve the entire development process. He should not be spending time with other QA personnel focused on QA functions. When I was Technical Director for EVE Online, I made sure there were minimal discussions gated by job title. Talk of a trade went on in Communities of Practice, which were open to all. Sometimes this didn’t happen, and those times were mistakes.

Like Rands says:

Yes, we actually have the same goal: rigorously confirming whether or not the product is great.

If that’s the case, QA should not be broken out into a separate department. QA should be working side by side, reporting into the same people, measured by the same success metrics, contributing to the holistic success of an entire product.

I love the QA Mindset. It’s tragic that having a QA Mindset gets confused with having a QA Department.