SteveB wrote:
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of
> > Wes Peters
> > Sent: Saturday, December 23, 2000 11:29 PM
> > To: Drew Eckhardt
> > Cc: SteveB; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > Subject: Re: Sitting on hands (no longer Re: FreeBSD vs
> > Linux, Solaris,
> > and NT)
> >
> >
> > Drew Eckhardt wrote:
> > commercial companies have formal QA staff because their
> > development staff either can't or won't do the QA
> > themselves.
> >
>
> Developers shouldn't do their own QA they will miss things.
> They are too close to the code. You need another set of
> eyes to check things out. Places I've been developer's had a White Box
> QA engineer to work with early on. They wrote the test beds, setup
> development environments, tested pieces as developed, and would do
> some of the debugging for the developer. White Box QA were usually
> future developers and it helped train them. Then as the projects take
> shape the Black Box QA testers come in to do their bam-bam thing
> simulating users. Then building install programs and managing beta and
> burning the official release disks. Do you really want developers to
> be involved in all that?
>
> A good QA team save everyone time to focus on their own jobs.
The above can best be described as a nutshell plan for quality as a built
in process, something every project should do. In our place, we substitute
other developers for the "QA engineer". In most companies, QA engineers
are simply developers who didn't quite make it anyways. Taking the time of
valuable engineers is seen as too costly for the gains made. We have the
luxury of not accounting for the costs, and so do it with the talented
people we already have.
Don't misunderstand me here, I am NOT labelling all Quality Engineers as
incompetent flacks, but rather pointing out that most QA departments are
filled with other than Quality Engineers. I used to work for a company
that defined the most rigorous software quality standards and test plans
ever devised, and I still admire their ability. Many of the techniques
they encoded into MIL-STDs are practiced, mostly instictively, by various
members of the BSD community. In fact, they would probably benefit from
the expertise of BDE greatly.
--
"Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?"
Wes Peters Softweyr LLC
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://softweyr.com/
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