Eh, it seems fairly unobjectionable if a bit overly simplistic to me. I did testing for about 7 years prior to dev, and my take is that it a) depends on the siz

Eh, it seems fairly unobjectionable if a bit overly simplistic to me. I did testing for about 7 years prior to dev, and my take is that it a) depends on the size of the team and b) a fully fleshed out QA team needs a variety of skills and fills several roles: On the one hand, you need 1) grinders who can do the sort of boring, script driven sorts of regression testing that are essential but difficult to automate.[1] You also need 2) people with a good eye for usability and with a good overview of the system who can provide the sort of feedback Joel mentions. A certain amount of creativity and exploratory skills helps with ad hoc testing and devising test cases. "I wonder what happens if I push this button and then that one." Then, 3) someone who can read code and who understand lower level (OS/database) stuff can come up with some interesting test cases that a black box tester may miss. As in, "what happens to temp files/tables that are created by the app? are they ever deleted?" And finally, 4) if you can find them, you need someone who can program in order to build test tools and automated frameworks (that's mostly what I did). The goal of the latter being improving the efficiency of the entire team. Finding all of these wrapped in a single person is almost impossible, as #1 tends to be incompatible with the rest. [1] Obviously, if you can automate these in a way that's cost effective, that's preferable, but that's not the typical case.