People in QA are irrelevant!
Dec22
I’m still getting amazed on the misuse of evaluation opportunities within the ‘quality’ world. In 2009 I wrote several posts around the usage of evaluations in IT. And still I don’t see enough of it around me. There even is a clear business case behind it; by finding defects in an early stage of the project the solution of them cost less, then when you find them in a later stage in the project.
There clearly is an easy business case, but people are not using them at all. Or at least enough and that’s just plain dumb! And where is the fault to this? Who can I blame for these mistakes that cost time, money and resources. Sure it’s easy to say that the project manager is to blame. He or she is only focused on progress and doing evaluations is not beneficial to progress of delivering a project. But that’s how their managers manage them; their managers want them to stay focused on in time and within budget. As a result focus goes on time.
But hey, it also stated within budget. Why are they not focusing on this equally? And it this time of crisis, at least again in Europe, costs should be the main focus on management. Don’t go beyond the budget! Plan for the budget as you plan on time. Cutting costs hasn’t always only have to be done by doing less projects or cutting on features, it can also be done by focusing more on cost reducing activities for the whole project life cycle.
It looks like a clear case; in this hour of cost savings we save as much as possible. Wrong! As said we save on the projects that we do, we save on the features within those projects. All good options to save money, don’t get me wrong. But we can same more and even save on time. According to the STBC (The economics of testing) the ratio is 1:10:100 in costs (Requirements vs. Testing vs. Production).
So it’s up to us, people in QA, Testing, Users and other people that are working in some kind of quality service to deliver this message and deliver it in a project. If you cannot do this you’re making yourself irrelevant. Most project managers know they have to test. They need to comply with regulations and rules to show that a certain amount of quality is in the delivered system. An expensive option to accessing quality and prove its compliance.
There are less expensive options that even let you provide a higher degree of expected quality; using evaluations. And the ROI needs to be clearly shown, by people in QA. And if you don’t do this you’re making yourself irrelevant. Because some people in development, like this blog from Clemens Reijnen, are opening their eyes and are making a difference. So don’t be stupid, be relevant!
Maybe Agile can help????
February 23rd, 2012 at 10:57