The overall software development panorama is changing, and these changes involve mostly a shift in previously blindly accepted paradigms and role delimitation. Today, the development of software, websites and apps has turned into a user-responsive framework recently called Shift Left, giving way to the establishment of cross-functional teams made up of members that specialize in different fields (code, design, architecture, script, testing) but that are exhorted to work interdependently and in a collaborative way with every other member and department.
Tom BjörkholmConsultant| Knowit ConnectivityLinköping, Sweden
In software development the trend is to move away from manual testing done by testers, and move towards automated testing with the tests written by test programmers. This move to automated testing is necessary, because there is no time to do all the tests manually.
This is still testing, but it requires a different skill set.
Naturally there also needs to be some exploratory manual testing, but the percentage of tests done manually is decreasing and will continue to decrease.
As Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister stated already in "Peopleware": "Quality is free for the those who are prepared to invest heavily in it." If you start to build a quality product and from the beginning you invest heavily in automated testing, you will finish the release faster. If you start by cutting corners with quality and then just before release have to try to fix these quality issues it will take a lot longer.
If the QA and QC are in a separate department or if they are in the same team as the developers is another question. Different organisations have different preferences. In general anything you can do to enhance communication between developers, QC and QA should be good. Saving Changes...
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