[bitmage]

Ugh. I worked QA years ago and swore to never do it again. Management hates you because you're telling them the product is not ready to ship. Developers hate you because you're pointing out their errors. No one has your back, and everyone wants to blame you.

The company had literally fired the whole testing department previously for saying the product wasn't ready. With those annoying testers out of the way, out the door it went. And promptly had multiple emergency point releases the following week to fix showstoppers cropping up at the customer sites.

That got them to create a testing department again - but it was still without honor in the company. And firing the whole group again was often discussed, as they were _still_ delaying releases by finding bugs!

I departed. They got eaten in a merger several months later.

[stan_rogers]

Ugh indeed. And it's not like this issue hasn't been mentioned a time or two before now. Joel Spolsky in 2000: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000067.html

...and again in 2010: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/01/26.html

...(with more than a couple of other mentions in between). I've worked at ISO 900x shops that worked to the letter of the law, so to speak, without actually understanding what software QA was all about. A really good tester is "chaotic neutral", and the best we can come up with as testers of our own work is "lawful evil".

[D-Coder]

I'm a developer and I love my QA department. It's unprofessional and embarrassing to ship a bug. QA prevents that (not always but frequently). When they find a bug in my code I say "Thank you!"