Dev vs QA: Should There Be a Difference?

We had our scrum of scrum meetings last Wednesday where all scrum masters meet up with our line manager to discuss issues, bottlenecks and success stories of our previous sprint. One issue highlighted was the fact that sometimes the QA(Quality assurance) personnel are clogged up with testing issues that are in the "Ready for test" stage. So one idea that came about was that given the fact that some developer resources are freed up during this period, that it would be better off putting up some of their time to test the issues.

My first reaction was "HELL NO!!". My primary concern was that a developer will never have the mindset of a QA personnel when it comes to testing since he/she would always have a stringent approach on how to view the application. Also there is a notion among a few that doing QA is so "feminine" (again this is what i have observed and would differ from the context where i am in). So i took a step back, took a deep breath, turned off my dev-mode and looked at the suggestion in a more holistic manner.

I'm a person who loves to acquire new knowledge, be it from reading books, journals or simple through other's experience (young or old). So for me this turned out to be a way i could grab some new knowledge. Specially about software testing and quality. Now i know writing unit tests count for something, yet that is at its name dictates a unit level testing. When it comes to quality assurance, that is a whole new beast in its own right. Now you have to think in the perspective of how users interact with the system and not in the way you wrote the code for the application to behave.

By learning the art of QA testing, i believe that it would enable me to write morequality code since i would have the user's mindset and approach when testing my own code before i push it in to version control. Also in scrum the notion is that we as a team commit to deliver a set of issues we plan for a particular sprint. Hence if i do development or testing doesn't really matter since either way i am contributing towards helping my team achieve our team's commitment. It should not be thought of as someone else's responsibility. It's the team's responsibility to deliver the planned work on time with quality.

But such a change of mindset does not happen overnight. Its not merely about you going and telling each developer that he/she has got to start testing issues from the next sprint. I believe of leading by example. It's a win-win situation since i gain an extra skill of quality assurance testing whilst the team will emancipate themselves from the notion of thinking testing is not a part of responsibility of a developer (Hopefully). Change needs time to sink-in, and you cant coerce anyone into embracing change, but you can influence them through your actions.

What if some people never gets on board with this idea? Well i would say its their loss and my gain since in this dynamic business context we live in, i strongly believe if you try to stay with the pack, you will always be where you are right now.

Break away from restrictive thinking, like Lion-O of thunder-cats tells his awesome sword to give him sight beyond sight, we should strive to look through the limitations and think in ways we usually would not and get our lazy bottoms out of the conservative thinking mode.

That my friends brings me to the end of my note for the day. I hope you enjoyed reading it. Please do leave by your comments, views, criticisms and thank you for taking the time to read through.