Quality Assistant

I am often asked about how I deal with my programmers on a day to day basis. The question means well, I am giving them bad news about their work. It is only natural for anyone to doubt - how this paid relationship works!?

There is this joke / story I heard a while ago that could explain the tension between a developer and the QA. Here the Wife is the Developer and the Husband is the QA.

Wife: (puts on a new pair of jeans) Does this make my butt look big?

Husband: (just stares, if he tells her the truth, she might get mad. If she does not her friends will tell her the truth and she will still get mad)

Wife: Honey, you can tell me. I won’t get mad.

Husband: You say that now….

Wife: I promise I won’t get mad. You can tell me anything. We should be able to tell each other anything.

Husband: OK, here it goes. I slept with your sister.


That is how I typically roll. I gain their trust and then give them a bunch of bugs I found. It is not my job to make sure every bug I logged is fixed and is accepted. It is  team decision to fix a bug now or to backlog it or reject it. It is not my decision or the developer's decision. (Although this is old school thinking from 1997).

Thanks to this notion, many organizations maintain their teams working against each other while working for the same goal (like “frenemies”). But there are teams where developers and their testers work together to build not just a product, but something great. In the later the A in QA means Assistance. Not assurance!

I mean what are we assuring? What can we assure? We are assistants. We are quality assistants to the developers. We assist them in doing a better job. We are not finding faults. Together we build a better product.

I have not met a developer who did not care about the quality of their work or their

product. So, they care. They don’t just code and sit back for the QA to find issues and work on putting them down. They do their part of testing to make sure their code works. It is my job to make sure the product as a whole makes sense and it sensible (Yeah , yeah, bug free, what ever that means).

I prefer to make my application better by continuously exploring it, learning about it and respecting it. I dont believe in breaking it or trying to break it. (Again 1997??)