In the software world, development and QA are often organised into two separate teams.

Developers are responsible for writing the code, which they’ll periodically ‘pass over the wall’ for testers.

Testers will then test the software and raise issues in some bug tracking system and pass them back to developers to fix.

Some issues may bounce between the teams multiple times before they reach resolution and the release can ship.

As a developer, this has always struck me a hugely inefficient workflow. It’s full of communication overhead, liable to miscommunication, and crucially, allows developers to fall into bad habits as they begin to rely on a seperate team being responsible for quality.

As discussed elsewhere on the site, I advocate developers being responsible for testing both their own code and testing of the application quality as a whole.

However, if you do have seperate development and QA on staff, and are either adopting agile or simply want to work more efficiently, one of the most important changes you can make is to get your developers and QA teams working much closely together.