Quality comes from Professional Responsibility

Testing is a double edge sword. Testing is done for two reasons: to catch any unintended consequence of changes and (for risk management) giving a fresh view to find anything that would be a reputation issue if it reached a customer. However, because testing is done there may be a tendency for a “I’ve got a safety net” mentality that can allow corners to be cut and process precision to be lost.

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My dirty little secret: code in the raw

This is a unashamed geek post. 

I was asked this week why I gave up being a programmer and moved into software quality and project management.

Software Testing: QA or QC

In every other field the testing of products is called Quality Control (QC) but in IT (software especially, it is called QA (Quality Assurance).    This is a historic anomaly.

In the early years of computing, computer time was so precious that programmers had to submit their code for a review to prove they had followed all the coding standards and local rules before it would be typed in to the system, compiled and (hopefully) run. This process check was quality assurance (QA).  Often those doing the checking were not skilled programmers so could not actually test the code (QC) to see if it would work.

Eventually, programmers got used to typing their own code into PCs and the QA team became mainly system testers.