Quality Assistance

I’ve had a gut feeling for a while that the existence of a dedicated QA team actually leads to more bugs, not fewer, by letting developers off the hook for the quality of their software.

It was fascinating for me to learn about the approach that Atlassian takes to ensuring the quality of their Jira product. The presentation below by the head of QA for the Jira team sums up their almost heretical approach to quality assurance, which they think of more as quality assistance.

I love their idea that QA experts should function more as testing consultants that are charged with helping the developers to be better testers themselves, with the ultimate goal of the testing consultants moving on to other things once the developers are self-sufficient.

Instead of pair programming, how about pair testing—where a QA expert pairs with a developer to do exploratory testing of the developer’s work.

It’s so interesting to see how they’ve basically inverted the typical flow of activity during an iteration. The QA input comes before the development work starts, not after it’s done (well, “done”).

All in all, learning about a fresh approach like this gives me hope that as an industry we can come up with better ways to resolve the tensions between development and QA in an Agile context.