SD Times Article by Jason English
The current meta-trend of hidden software testing — in which much of software testing gets pushed to shift-right, post-production validation — led me here.
I’ve spent most of my life working with technology firms where testing was an unassailable virtue, and therefore, the concept of testing was constantly encouraged. Now, it seems like many companies are pushing QA upstream to customers.
The stakes for quality are still high. So why has software testing gotten such short shrift lately?
Test teams have changed
Remember when there used to be a QA team, separate from the development team in any decent-sized IT shop with a software delivery function?
This QA team staffed as many as one tester for every 3 to 10 Dev and Ops people. Test-driven development encouraged earlier unit and regression testing burdens to be shared between teams.
Unfortunately, first-to-market pressures truncated QA teams that faced ever-shortening test windows, and retained little authority to ‘stop the presses’ for quality issues. Many companies abandoned QA teams in favor of mingling testing and development. Who wants to be the buzz-kill that stopped the killer software release customers expected?
