No, it is not a rhetorical question for a Monday morning. It’s a strategy that startups are using to find bugs in production. ‘Oh, our Software Testing team will be with you with the observability and monitoring tools, don’t you worry!’ they say. There you go, shift-right. But those testing teams can only find the defects after the fact. Finding the defects after-the-fact by the customers is not problematic for some industries like online shopping, but it is catastrophic for some industries like airplane software!
That is the essence of my thoughtful conclusion after I went through this article about Quality Assistance, Quality Engineering, Software Craftsmanship, Quality Tower, etc. No doubt, it all sounds so appealing. Right from 1970s, Software Engineering knew that the cost of finding a defect increases rapidly late in the process and there is nothing new about it to be called as Quality Engineering. As Software Testers, we have always nudged the product managers and development to fix the gnawing requirement gaps and module level defects. It looks like finally, people are listening and doing unit tests, but requirements part still remains to be seen.
There are some interesting things that I observed in that article. After the usual bashing of Waterfall and Scrum (as usual without giving credits to them for what they helped with in their times), and the routine quote from Deming, which is the usual playbook of the Extreme Programming, the article goes on produce something like a Venn Diagram, but not specifying what the intersecting portions of the circles do and how they work. Well, such colorful diagrams are not new in the industry and certainly make good corporate presentations.
Then it talks about a word keyed by Atlassian – Quality Assistance. Nothing new here. Software Testers have always participated in the walkthroughs and reviews of architecture, design, and code, and provided their inputs. Also, It is definitely needed for all the team members from the Product Owner to the production monitoring take ownership of Quality, there is no doubt about it, and there is nothing new about it. In fact, Software Testing has always emphasized that Quality is a whole team responsibility and Software should not be shoved to them without making quality efforts in an ethical, professional way. The developers didn’t do it, so that does mean we can take post-code software testing away?
Then comes ‘Quality Engineering’. It claims to do ‘better development tools, infrastructure, training and support’ for the developers. This is the diplomatic way of saying people hired for this purpose will be the infrastructure support and tooling for the developers. Of course, this is not the charter of a Software Testing team and they would definitely not do it.
Then comes ‘Quality Management/Governance’, which I presume is a word for firefighting when there are internal or external troubles.
Finally comes the results of all this – a graph of increasing and then tapering defects – as reported by who? Surprise, surprise! The customers! Do we want our customers to be the Software Testers for our products? In this particular instance, there is no mention of an internal testing which would have found the defects before it reached the customers. And I think they didn’t have one, let the defects go the customers, customers used the product, found the bugs, raised tickets, and then the product team fixed it. It may work for this industry – online shopping, where the cost of an error is relatively negligible – things like the stuff you added to the shopping cart do not show up in it, or you have the wrong price listed for an item in the final total, etc. The customers would have anyway screamed at these kind of bugs and they would have been fixed. But do you think this would work for all industries? Like Telecom? Internet? Banking? Health? Logistics & Supply Chain?
Not only that, Software is now ubiquitous, and we have apps everywhere. It would be irresponsible to let customers find the bugs for you. I got a chance to read and review the book ‘Changing Times – Quality for Humans in a Digital Age’ by Rich Rogers, in which he has cleared explained with examples on how insufficiently tested applications affect people’s daily lives.
It is dangerous to proselyte Software industry to not to have post-development internal testing using such fancy words and Venn diagrams. Software Testing is needed.
For detailed analysis and handholding in Software Testing and Quality for your organisation, feel free to setup a free initial consultation with me. Happy Testing!
