It feels like ages that I blogged about the place of QA in software development. Granted, in internet years, it has been a while. But the topic never seems to quite go away.
Since I wrote that other blog post, a lot of things have happened here at spriteCloud. In the meantime, we’ve been involved in the testing process with quite a few more customers (yay!). One thing that emerged over time is that many companies don’t exactly come to us for testing alone, but also for answering the question of how to fit testing into the development and release process.
When you try to answer that question, it quite often happens that you discover that the reason these companies didn’t know how to fit testing into their process is that there is not much of a process in place to fit testing into. To us QA-minded people, that may come as a surprise, but it really shouldn’t be.
As one young developer at one of our clients put it to me (slightly paraphrased): “They should really teach release management in university. Programming is easy enough to pick up, but this stuff is hard to figure out on your own.” I sympathize with that, as it mirrors my own experience from some ten years or so ago when I started out on my development career.
Before you can teach anything about development processes, though, it is essential that one understands the software lifecycle.
