2.8Dealing with Organizations That Do Not Value QA
If you find yourself in an organization where QA is an afterthought, you have three options: change the culture, work within the constraints, or leave. Here is how to try option one before resorting to option three.
Signs QA Is Not Valued
- QA is always the first budget cut
- QA is not invited to planning or design discussions
- "We do not have time for testing" is a frequent statement
- QA engineers are paid significantly less than developers
- There is no QA career path -- senior QA engineers leave or become developers
- Production bugs are blamed on QA, not on the team
How to Change It
Start with one team. Do not try to change the whole organization at once. Find one team lead or engineering manager who is open to better quality practices. Demonstrate results with that team, then use those results to expand.
Speak the language of business. Executives do not care about test coverage or defect density. They care about revenue, customer retention, and risk. Frame everything in those terms.
Document the cost of poor quality. Track production incidents, customer complaints, developer time spent on hotfixes, and rollbacks. Build a quarterly report that shows the true cost of skipping quality investment.
Be a partner, not a police officer. If QA is perceived as the department that blocks releases and makes developers' lives harder, the culture will never change. Be the team that helps ship faster with confidence.