Elements of Software Quality

Software Quality Assurance is more than testing; it's a total team approach. So the goal of a senior SQA Engineer is not to find defects, but to prevent defects by working with their team.

Collaboration

Nothing can be made in isolation.

Sales goes out to visit potential customers -- their names come from Marketing. Then they present the product vision and value proposition. If the customer is interested, they get a demo, showing what the Engineers have done. When purchasing, Support works with the code to impement solutions for the customer and brings feedback and issues back to the Engineers.

Within Engineering, the coding and testing tasks go hand in hand; even better if they are shared. The coders take input from the product owner, and meetings with customers; the testers work by their side, with the same inputs. The line between coding and testing is blurred, and their mutual goal is to produce a high-quality product, one that pleases the customers.

In a team, communication, mutual respect and consensus building is important. Quality products depend on a team working smoothly as much as the processes and technologies.

The Customer is Mostly Right

If you ask a customer what they want, they'll tell you. But many software project founder because when they deliver what the customer has asked for, it is rejected.

Why? Because what a customer thinks they want in a complex system usually isn't what they really want. The only way to work through the learning process for your customers is frequent tests -- put your product in their hands and let them try it out.

Once they have a product, the customer is always right. There is no "user error" in support calls. First, because the call has already cost you the money to answer it.

There are always those occasions when all the customer needs is some explanation of how the developer thought a function should work. But in these cases you need to ask ask why isn't that usage obvious to the customer? And what in the product lead the customer to think they should use it in the manner they did?