some<\/em> quality assurance activities along with his activities. I don\u2019t details on his testing activities, so I can\u2019t guess any more than that.<\/p>\nIn regards to Bolton\u2019s thoughts, where I differ is that I think that testers can<\/em> dabble in Quality Assurance. This statement doesn\u2019t apply if you only test apps after they are complete or mostly complete in order to quickly find any \u201cship-stoppers\u201d, but when development and test are well integrated, there is a possiblity. In my world, testers get to be involved from the earliest inceptions of pre-design. Now, it\u2019s one thing to be \u201cin the room\u201d during a design discussion, but many testers are capable of inserting some QA type goo into the discussion, as well as finding ways to improve the creation of software throughout the product cycle. Some examples include:<\/p>\n\n- Testers ask things like \u201cHow are we going to test this?\u201d, and \u201chow will we know if we\u2019re successful?\u201d during design reviews. <\/li>\n
- Testers can look at the most severe bugs found during the last product cycle and develop tools or checklists to prevent those types of bugs from occurring in the future.<\/li>\n
- Testers can instigate process change. I\u2019ve never been on a team where testers weren\u2019t involved in highlighting inefficiencies in software engineering processes and implementing changes to improve on those inefficiencies. Normal leadership gotcha\u2019s on organizational change apply (i.e. it\u2019s hard, but certainly possible) <\/li>\n
- A HUGE point I agree on with Michael (and others) is that test is not the gatekeeper of quality. When I hear testers talk about \u201csigning off\u201d on a release, I cringe. What testers can<\/em> do early is say \u201cthis is the information we\u2019re going to provide \u2013 and we think you can make a ship decision with this information\u201d. Then instead of signing off on a release, testers can say \u201conly half the tests are running, and half of those fail. Customers are complaining, and perf is in the toilet. scheduled ship date is next Tusday \u2013 it\u2019s your call\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Good testers have a critical eye \u2013 not just for product issues, but in how the product is made \u2013 <\/em>so it\u2019s not completely out of the question for capable testers in the right environment to dabble a bit in QA activities. <\/p>\nThe summary \u2013 if you\u2019ve both read this far, and I\u2019ve lost you is:<\/p>\n
\n- QA and testing are different<\/li>\n
- IMO, QA is not an activity you do to a feature <\/li>\n
- In the right circumstances, some people in test roles can perform QA activities<\/li>\n
- But QA activities are generally separate from test activities<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Got it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A week or so ago, I tweeted the following: I loathe the use of "QA" as a verb to replace test. E.g. "Facebook needs to QA their features better" – that doesn’t make any f*ing sense. Paul Carvalho (@can_test) didn\u2019t agree \u2013 he stated that test is a subset of qa, and that since he…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}