Dennis Stevens: We are Doing QA All Wrong

A few interesting things from an article by Dennis Stevens, very loosely quoted...

• We Don’t Understand Quality Assurance
• We Don’t Understand the Cost of Rework
• Rework from failed QA tests are extremely expensive to flow. Sending work back into development interrupts work in process. This has a dramatic effect on cycle time across the system – which results in increased cost of every item in the system.
• the cost of setting up testing environments is much lower
• Quality Assurance needs to be part of the development team and process. We need to change our thinking around this. So we need to integrate Quality Assurance very early in the process.
• We have the Wrong Expectations
• We Expect Perfection - Not Improved Value
• We Expect Local Optimization - Not Flow
• Enable value, flow, and ongoing improvement

Dennis Stevens » Blog Archive » We are Doing QA All Wrong 

From the comments:

• One thing: No one can assure quality. Can I convince you to change the reference to “Quality Assistance?” (Jon Bach)
• I prefer ‘testing’ and ‘tester’ to ‘quality assurance’ and ‘QA engineer’ or whatever. But these are nits. The message of Dennis’s post is the point – focus on value, improvement, delivering a better product. (Lisa Crispin)
• I introduce myself to teams as the “public health nurse” for their project, and then subtly place ‘quality assistance’ in my email signature. (Adam Geras) 
• testing is a complex, organic, cognitive activity, rather than a rote, bureaucratic, clerical one. (Michael Bolton)  

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