[Reading time: 1 minutes 21 seconds]
QA is the bane of an engineer’s existence. The pesky people with the clipboards and the checklists, considered nerdy even among nerds.
Terrible, terrible, I tell you.
Yet we all claim that quality is important to us, so we suffer the annoying checklists and clipbards.
Right?
Wrong!
Quality isn’t about checklists at all, just like painting art isn’t about washing brushes. Even though washing brushes may be part of what a painter has to do.
QA is about actually having quality in mind, whatever you do. It shouldn’t be any particular person’s job, or a particular stage of the development process.
It should be the very foundation of our entire development effort, from initial ideation all the way to delivery, and then during operation.
Because QA isn’t about checklists – it’s about continually, carefully asking what our product should be achieving for the customer, and then paying attention to whether it does.
It’s about people, considering other people’s needs and wants. And then, maybe a checklist can be a handy reminder. But the checklist can only be part of achieving quality the same way bushes can be part of creating a painting.
What matters is who holds the brush
What matters is who reads the checklist, and the thoughts and questions rattling around in their heads.
And if DevOps is about delivering faster, more frequently, in act continuously, then the same thing must hold for thinking about and working towards great quality.