Upon further review…

I tweeted this out the other day in response to watching a project manager get abused by a “senior IT director” over defects being found by clients that they clearly felt should have been “caught by QA”. Apparently this resonated with the testing community as the reactions have been overwhelmingly in support of the sentiment and anti-bullying position.

But with everything else awful about the “internets”, it also brought out of the woodwork the usual agenda driven “agilistas”, “no testers” and “suck it up buttercup” weasels reading into it whatever they already were bringing to party. All that’s fine, but because of the traction it received I thought it was worth having the entire thread and sentiment in one place. Here’s the full tweet thread for context:

I also added the following in an comment on LinkedIn:

No mention of organization structure. No mention of operating model. No mention of methodology. No mention of tools.

I have never employed the “testing firewall” approach to software quality and have always advocated for testing as an activity that can require a full time role. What I dislike about “why didn’t we catch this in QA”, is that it’s classic goal displacement from building quality products to trying to “test” quality into a product. I have also seen it repeatedly used to belittle, shame, and abuse people performing testing into feeling bad about themselves and their contribution to an organization for problems that typically do not originate with them.

Hopefully this give the full context for my thoughts and please read the threads on Twitter and LinkedIn for ways we can do better…enjoy!

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