| QA Engineer here. We don't have a centralized QA department, but we do have a dedicated engineer who is responsible for QA that is integrated within the development team. Before I joined my team, it didn't have a dedicated QA member. The quality of the software was fine, but there were other compromises. The team didn't have a good test strategy - every developer made adhoc decisions on how their code was tested. Our E2E tests ran slowly and had tonnes of duplicates, since nobody had gone through the entire list and cleaned it up. A dedicated QA member has the time and the responsibility to solve problems with quality that most devs are likely to treat as secondary to developing features. And the improvements are substantial - our E2E tests now run 18x (!) faster. For the most part, I see my role as being an enabler - I help devs build quality into their work and hold them accountable to it. I don't see it as an adverserial division of responsibility, but more as a collaborative effort, with the dev and QA coming from a different focal point. The problem with strict division of labour and adverserial QA is that it leads to 1) Organizational / team silos 2) Local optimization (software development and QA is intricately interwoven, so it doesn't lend itself well to this strict division) 3) Information overhead and loss A good QA engineer, IMO, requires better coordination and communication skills than a developer because they liaise with multiple developers and inspire them to make quality a priority in their work. Further, QA is involved from the definition of a feature (in sprint refinements) right up to when code is deployed and runs well in production. Therefore, at certain points, the boundaries between QA and the Dev team or QA and the PO blur and disappear entirely. I found this to be a great read that summarizes my thoughts on the topic: https://www.thoughtworks.com/en-de/insights/blog/qa-dead |
If it's a collective "we learned from this", that's good.
If it's seriously and organizationally adversarial, that's bad.