Many people in Q/A are B or C programmers who can't find a job otherwise. While they can be a necessary part of a larger Q/A team, they won't create the quality themselves which will make your company successful.
In addition to hiring for Q/A, having a person or team who's sole focus is on maximizing company 'quality' is necessary to make products which not only implement the specified features but are going to be successful in the market and which will not have unknown major issues.
- How does it perform on Starbuck's wifi?
- What happens if I shake my computer while it is saving?
- If I turn on the Chinese language, will our text look correct?
- Are there any trends in our error logs that others missed?
- Does it perform differently at night?
- What types of errors is the QA team missing?
- Are people not talking about the actual problems in meetings? Is it because the meetings are too early/late in the morning?
- What happens if I add 100x the load?
At EmSense, we had an amazing person who took this role. He came up with more ways to try testing/breaking/playing with/using/misusing our software than I could dream of.
Key traits:
- Loves Q/A - not because their programming skills are bad, but because they love Q/A problems.
- Can actually program - sometimes writing a script or a small app is what is necessary to solve a problem.
- Has shipped multiple real products - There is something people can only learn over time which helps them solve future problems.
- Is pretty good with people - most issues are only solved by talking with the team or talking with customers.
- Is willing to create conflict and push until a problem is actually solved correctly.
- Is willing to buy the team coffee if that solves the problem - real answers come from crazy places.
- Has enough confidence to fail for weeks at a time.
