Slashdot Mirror
QA != Testing
gManZboy writes "Original author of Make and IBM Researcher, Stu Feldman has written an overview of what should be (but is sadly perhaps not) familiar ground to many Slashdotters: Quality Assurance. He argues that QA is not equivalent to 'testing', and also addresses the oft-experienced (apparent) conflict between QA-advocates and 'buisiness goals.'"
From TFA:
QA is described as making sure a project is "measurably meeting expectations and conforming to requirements"
At my job, requirements are often one-sentence requests with no needed detail whatsoever. If it then doesn't go to a business analyst in the IT department, that's what the programmers work from. When the QA process starts, it makes it easy to say that you've complied with all details of the requirements.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Six Sigma is one of the many quality processes out there that can apply to everything from design to manufacturing. The idea is to remove variation so that everything you do is always the same. Quite boring but effective.
This can apply to the way code is written and does in some companies.
Evolution or ID?
What a revolutionary point of view/complaint this article gives! In the sense that "revolutionary" means that history goes through a loop and comes back to where it was before...
It is interesting to see though, how every so many years the same ideas pop up in new guises. Edger Dijkstra for instance said more or less the same thing about Software Engineering and its mantra of process phases and planned testing. And the same argument can (and has) been brought against Kent Beck's Extreme Programming methodology.
Oh well, just goes to show you: the only lesson ever learned from history is that nobody ever learns from history.
An excellent example of how anecdotal evidence can lead you to incorrect conclusions.
The SEI was approached by the military a couple decades ago. The military had a problem; when it contracted out software development work, it would sometimes get back what it was looking for, it would sometimes get it on time. Sometimes it was late, sometimes it didn't work, sometimes it did the wrong thing, and sometimes they got nothing at all.
The SEI went about polling a large number of contractors, trying to see what was common amongst the ones who delivered. They found there was actually a very strong correllation between a number of processes and practices and high-quality under-budget software. The result is the Capability Maturity Model or CMM for short, which divides companies up into 5 "levels".
The kind of organization you describe is quite definately a "level 1" company, the kind with the highest risk, and the lowest quality. Most companies, even small ones, should strive to follow the practices of at least level 3, as the benefits are quite tangible; no more late projects, and vastly fewer defects.
I mentioned it in another post, but my dad has a good web site that deals with quality issues (IE only, unfortunately). And, if you're looking to improve the quality of your software, his current contract is going to expire soon.
in some (many, most?) cases QA becomes the definitive answer to what the requirements actually are. In some cases the requirements are not very precise, so it is up to the developer to translate them into the code and it is up to the QA to decide whether the developers' interpretation is good enough for the purposes of the system. In reality if you have a QA department, the QA defined test-cases become the guide to how the program behaves under various conditions. These test-cases define the system better than the requirements in some (many, most?) cases.
You can't handle the truth.
"I think that all biz people need to take a basic programming course, and all coders need to take a business class."
That's simple, logical, and of no practical use. As part of my CIS degree, I was well over half way (close to three quarters) to a Business Management degree. It is absolutely useless for all of the business software I have to write.
My current project is to rewrite the entire county tax collection system. There is no business class that would have prepared me for that because each county collector does things differently.
I knew nothing about tax collection when I started this project, and the county collector knows nothing about software design (his belief that Fox Pro has exposed him to software development, and his need to micromanage notwithstanding).
He and I frequently meet to discuss the business rules his office currently uses, and the business rules he would like to be able to use. He tells me each feature he wants, and I create all the ends (front, middle, and back) to do it. Then we review the front ends and results from the backend.
This iterative process continues, on a feature by feature basis, until we are both satisfied that each feature works as it should and the user interface is streamlined for efficiency.
The bottom line is that detailed business understanding by the developers is both unnecessary and mostly useless. Software design knowledge by business people is also mostly useless (and in fact will likely be very detrimental) and unnecessary.
The common threads between business people and software developers to ensure success are good communication skill and patience. Without both of those, you may as well not even try.
The quality of the product is not in focus. If you try talk about things like Lint and Purify with persons representing Quality you will get an answer that that isn't about quality at all...
So the whole Quality business is something that is invented to support itself and not the end customer of the product. In the long run the customer is actually more interested in the quality of the product than any provided documentation that states that this product was created with our Superior Methods and Ultimate Skill. That documentation doesn't help at all if the product crashes twice a day...
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
BOVE'S THEOREM: The remaining work to finish in order to reach your goal increases as the deadline approaches.
PARKINSON'S LAW: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
This is why I don't believe in deadlines (to a degree).
_Everything_ is a work in progress, deadlines are rarely met, or if they are the stress and rush is rarely worth the satisfaction of meeting the deadline.
I would strongly recommend all people to read How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life. The guy is annoyingly into time management. Its his fulltime job! He sets his watch 3 minutes fast so he's "ahead of the world", and always takes advantage of those 5 or so minute waits to make lists of things to do and whatnot. But here is the best thing I got from the book. Keep in mind that this dude is anally retentive -- bigtime.
He lets his employees bring pleasure stuff to work with them, and as soon as they finish what they are tasked to do he lets them read, do puzzles, sew, or whatever they want while at work.
My jaw dropped when I was reading those pages. That did not make any sense to me whatsoever.
Then he said why. He said that if he gave someone a set time to do something, they would stretch it out to finish exactly at that time. By letting people not have a deadline and do something they want to do when finished with their work, he was actually able to get _more_ work out of them. It was also clear to him without taking any of his time to tell when his employees were done with their work and could be tasked with something else. Completely without any communication.
A side benefit, is that the employees actually feel more free, and get their work done in a more timely manor than if he gave them a deadline.
When I worked in a mainframe group at a major airline writing code for internal use in flight ops, we had a small team of a dozen or so experienced programmer/analysts (perhaps 15 years of experience on average) who each knew their business/application area rather well in addition to being quite competent technically.
We also tended to work directly with a dedicated set of business analysts who were also quite experienced, being dedicated "end users" from various operational areas, and it was a collaborative effort to design and implement projects large and small.
After years of working with the same experienced people, the system worked *very* well. We had processes in place to help ensure that proper testing and documentation was done and that no unauthorized production loads were made -- otherwise, we basically trusted people to use their best judgement.
Since the folks who were writing the code were also supporting the application 24x7 on a rotating basis, they had a vested interest in keeping the system stable.
I think that demonstrated (at least to me) that sometimes a full-blown separate QA process isn't required. By doing things in a somewhat abbreviated way, however, the group was a lot more agile, and quality fixes could literally be coded and loaded in a matter of hours (in some cases).
When I worked for Unisys on application development for paying customers, however, we had a much more formalized process. We had dedicated business analysts writing the func specs, programmer/analysts to write code to those specs, and dedicated QA people who designed and helped implement formal test scripts (both manual and automated) before the product was rolled out.
The size of the group and the nature of the product made that level of QA more important, I think, but it was also implemented knowing that the software development cycle in place was a slow and deliberate process.
Moral of the story: Maintaining a local system for internal corporate use is sometimes a VERY different process from developing commercial software for external customer use, and the two situations can sometimes differ greatly in approach while still maintaining a very high level of quality.
I also think it depends quite a bit on the quality of the people you have in place, and also on the level of experience those people have with the product, the technology, and in working with each other. Experienced people can work wonders if you let them.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
One of my main Day Jobs up to a few years ago was working in QA for Major Computer and Software Manufacturers.
The idea of:
Testing = finding bugs
QA = determining which features are required, and whether or not they work as intended for the end-user.
Is fine in theory, but rarely happens in practice. It usually ends up that QA is ignored and conflated into bug testing. And even then, it often doesn't matter.
Example: I was working on a team that developed an Important Piece of Software That Is Very Popular These Days. We Had No Specification.
None. After some terrifying meetings with the CEO, we somehow brought it to a 1.0 release. I didn't want to have to go through that little nightmare again, so at the 1.0 post mortem meeting, I asked "So, we built 1.0 without a spec - what exactly are we going to do next? What is the Specification for 2.0?"
The lead programmer looked right at me and said "The Spec for 2.0 is 1.0."
We had shipped 1.0 with over 850 bugs, with half a dozen known (if somewhat obscure) crashing bugs, and with several features "turned off" because we couldn't get them to work.
At that point I knew I had to get the fuck out of there. I wasn't going to spend over 2 hours a day driving just to help this rolling train wreck. I left as we shipped 2.0.
From there I went to a company That Was Also Extremely Famous (but now defunct) where QA was more of an expensive after thought. they hired a great team, but the engineers were so disjointed that the product kept changing every other month.
The stress level was so high at that company, of the 120 employees, half a dozen attempted suicide in the 9 months I worked there. At one point, there was such a row in basic engineering philosophy, two of the main programmers got into a fist fight. When the money dried up, we all got laid off.
We can go on and on about how important QA is, but the fact is, we're in a business that makes products, and when the business is more than a dozen people jammed in a garage or airless office space, the products tend to be driven by marketing droids. Left to their own devices, Engineers will produce complex objects that don't necessarily work or fulfil a worthwhile function, or do it in a way that is elegant and useful. Left to QA, the product never gets out the door, because Software Engineering *ISN'T*. SE is more like knitting or quilt making than an Engineered Science. Bridge Builders use Engineers - they have books full of equations that have been proven over the years and they use these solid tested things in a creative way to solve a problem : how to get from here to there.
When a bridge fails, or a building collapses, they just look at the evidence and compare it to the known working materials sciences, engineering principles, etc. and figure out how it failed.
With Software everything is written in a series of codes - at the machine level, we know what they do. But once you get into the meat and potatoes of software development, it all gets very wiggly very quickly. That's why TESTING is needed. And QA should be brought in even before the coding begins - when the UI is being developed, when the notion of the application's purpose and methods are being developed.
But, as noted above: if QA runs the show: it never ships, as there are always improvements to be made. Always.
So, you have the maketing droids who have the ear of the business managers who then set arbitrary and insane deadlines. The result? QA can't touch everything, or they conspire with Engineering that some sections are "good enough" and they let it go, so they can focus resources on testing problem areas, in order to meet the absurd deadline.
The end result is always the same: The public gets buggy software.
The only question is : How Buggy Is It?
They flip the crank, they do the late nights, they get the product out. QA and Eng do their littl