Just because some people get the wrong idea when something exists, doesn't mean the existence of that thing is an actual problem or detriment. It's true, slapp

Just because some people get the wrong idea when something exists, doesn't mean the existence of that thing is an actual problem or detriment. It's true, slapping "QA" on top of bad engineering isn't going to create quality. However, "having quality in mind throughout the development process" isn't going to guarantee it either, especially in a large and complex codebase with modules from many different teams. A QA org is useful for doing things like full-system testing, which can catch bugs that those individual teams might miss because they aren't testing the entire system. It's also useful to have dedicated testers because they'll test things out in ways the devs never thought of. Again, this isn't a replacement for quality engineering at the outset, but that's a management problem.