The Test Engineer is the Project Manager's Best Friend
Or should be...
Over the years, the status of the QA profession has evolved (or, more correctly, devolved). For some reason, it has become the norm to view the QA engineer as some kind of a "second rate citizen" in the project team. Most other professionals, in particular the development engineers, look down on them. The test engineer is considered some sort of a failing development engineer. If you try to be a developer and And, as it often times happens in life, this misconception becomes sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because of the poor image, nobody really wants to be a QA engineer, so only the no-so-good engineers end up "falling" down into this "lower caste" profession.
QA engineers are usually treated with resentment and viewed as a necessary evil and an obstacle on the way to the product release. Engineers treat them dismissively,try to order them around and pressure them to not delay the release. Usually, the QA group is officially subordinated to the engineering group, reporting to the Director or VP of Engineering. This is a clear conflict of interest! The QA people are managed by the development manager whom they are supposed to audit and whose product code they are required to test.
But for you - the project manager - the test engineer is the best friend! The QA engineer is your last "line of defense" in the release process before the product goes to the customer. He/she gives you the last chance to find the problems, catch the unacceptable bugs and generally, give you a professional, impartial assessment of the readiness of the product for release. And they are, by their profession, the most qualified to do that job. As a project manager you know (I hope) that it is so much better if the annoying QA engineer finds all these embarrassing issues, rather than the annoyed customer. So, the QA engineer can save you a lot of embarrassment and headache.
And it is actually not at all true that QA engineering is less sophisticated and technically challenging than the job of the developer. A good QA engineer must have the same technical skill level as the developers. A major reason for the misunderstanding is because too many people think: "QA Engineer = black-box testing". Indeed,black-box testing is not rocket science. However, any good QA engineer must be skilled in white-box testing and this is a whole different game altogether. I can easily find development engineers who will be challenged by QA engineers who implement white-box testing. And what about test automation? How many developers are skilled in building test automation tools? And what about testing of real-time, embedded software?
So, in your project, be sure to get the best QA engineers you can; protect them and support them and take their test findings seriously. If you don't the customer will. And do not save effort to change the team's attitude towards them Everybody must realize once and for all that testing is one of the best things in the release process.
Let me know what you think.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment