Hello. I am QA that writes tests for engineering. Technically, my title is a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET). Not only do I write "test plans", I w

Hello. I am QA that writes tests for engineering. Technically, my title is a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET). Not only do I write "test plans", I work on the test framework, infrastructure and the automation of those test plans. Every company is different on how they implement the QA function. Whether it be left to customer, developers, customer support, manual only QA, or SDET. It really comes down to how much leadership values quality or how leadership perceives QA. If a company has a QA team, I think the most success comes when QA get involved early in the process. If it is a good QA team, they should be finding bugs before any code is written. The later they are involved, the later you find bugs (whether the bugs are just "noise" or not) and then the tighter they get squeezed between "code complete" and release. I think that the QA team should have automation skills so more time is spent on new test cases instead of re-executing manual test cases. Anyways, from my vantage point, the article really hits hard. QA are sometimes treated as second class citizens and left out of many discussions that can give them the context to actually do their job well. And it gets worse as the good ones leave for development or product management. So the downward spiral is real.