QA Team is secondary to Development Team

Here are some observations and trends in the industry about Software Quality Assurance that have always troubled us as a company.

1. QA Teams are secondary to Development Teams - It is reflected in the amount of time allocated to their function, lower compensation of the team members and lower rates in case of consultants. In reality QA is the life blood of projects. QA teams are involved through out the lifecycle in defect removal activities. QA teams are required to possess high analytical ability, broad knowledge of the business domain and specific business processes being implemented in the system and obviously skills in functional testing. Considering these skills, isn’t QA an equally, if not more, important function?
2. QA Teams reporting to Development Manager - This creates conflict of interest where QA may get easily side-tracked and timelines squeezed to maximize development time. Developers perform limited unit and integration tests due to unrealistic schedules and QA is not offered enough time to test. In fact to our horror we came across a scenario where the QA team was asked to learn some programming and lend a helping hand in the development effort!

There are many more such trends that we will explore in future blogs. But an accurate understanding of such trends has helped us in formulating QA Strategies for our customers ranging from those following Iterative, Agile, Rational Unified to simple Waterfall models. In most cases it is not the Software Process that needs to be fixed, but the general outlook toward Quality Assurance as a critical function.

Rajesh