[convolvatron]

I agree. but having a QA group was hardly a magic bullet. most of the really talented contributors eschewed QA - even if they enjoyed it - because it meant being identified as a QA person for the rest of their career.

even if you could staff a competent group, they are often left with nothing to do while the devs 'work their magic'. and suddenly its 3 months past the original 'functionally complete' deadline, and QA is given 1 week to do what they .. oh, maybe 3 days really, to do what they need to do.

when it works its irreplaceable. when it doesn't its just a lot of noise and spend and flailing.

[cmrdporcupine]

The most productive QA/dev team experience I had back in the day was in a shop that was playing with eXtreme Programming and we did little 2-3 person strike mission per-issue groups with 2 to 3 devs and 1 QA person. Work on strictly defined small feature and continuously QA through the process, and then iteration end the QA person worked more intensely. The point being that the QA staff was treated like another development engineer even if they weren't writing code, so no "toss this over the fence to QA" and "oh god this is horrible, the devs are shit" mentality. Outcome of the feature was not just completed code, but (hopefully) test plans and sign-off from QA.

The QA people hated it though.

[hinkley]

I would definitely say that some of the finest and worst people I’ve worked with were in QA. Mercifully usually not at the same job. It can be a great place to push ideals, or to hide from them.

I know why it’s gone, I’m just not happy about it.