Peopleware has a chapter about "the black team" that was at IBM. The chapter is about team work but they describe how in the process of gelling the QA team deli

Peopleware has a chapter about "the black team" that was at IBM. The chapter is about team work but they describe how in the process of gelling the QA team delighted in finding programmer bugs. They describe how creation of a reputation and ethos in the black team not only made them a little better than other QA teams but significantly better. While it's easy to say that QA isn't important many of the QA teams I've worked with weren't respected or valued, and often saw QA as a stepping stone. If you want to increase the quality of the code, don't fire the QA team, motivate them.