I agree completely when it comes to enterprise, and your QA team is likely large enough and developed enough to have most of the required infrastructure set up

I agree completely when it comes to enterprise, and your QA team is likely large enough and developed enough to have most of the required infrastructure set up before the product even begins. However, the article seems to be dealing with smaller teams, but in particular it has the product manager actually working with QA to specify the QA plan from the outset himself. Your point about building up a fairly generic testing system right from the start like that seems like a very good idea. Most QA I've worked with hasn't been anywhere near that farsighted and probably where I got that opinion from - seeing QA throw out their hacked together models and hacking up a new model (and stringing together hacked up models...) From experience, I think most companies take the hacked-together route for QA and put their junior recruits in QA. This is probably different in a Fortune 50 company? I've yet to work at one of those...