| Sometime one must experience both side of the fences in the software development process. I've been a QA, QA Developer, Developer, and Integrator during my internships. QA is often the less honoured role of all. This creates a stigma that QA is some sort of crappy role to be in. Being second class citizen requires more support than ever to work at the top day to day. Unfortunately, most people are not built that way so quality degrades because QA was treated like crap. This leads to less advancement in the QA community because it's not a good role to be in. You only see a few books and a few noted experts in the QA community that continue to push better practices. At the end of the day, it's a loss for all of us. I wish there's none or minimum differences between QA and Developer as I agree with one of the comments here that if you do that, there will be more jobs created and IT professionals can experience different roles within our world. My opinion is that QA should have a wide range of skills from load/performance testings (that means knowing the tools and statistics), automation testings (that means if DEV created hard-dependency issue that is not easily testable, QA should step in and teach DEV the patterns and best practices to avoid such situation), QA should understand business practices to beat up stupid Business Analysts. More importantly, QA should keep track deficiencies and ineffectiveness during the development and potentially offer solution (or can be done through group discussions). Unfortunately, that's not how the world works. Telling someone that he's not efficient or pointing out where the most bugs occurred when the team lead is the one whose responsible for the feature isn't desirable. Not to mention that certain type of companies don't necessarily get the most ROI from having QA (if your typical Web 2.0 social networking tagging machine had a few issues, users probably complain but everyone will move on). |