Should QA exist?

Any process in an organization of size will have indicators that measure output. Those indicators should typically be paired with indicators that measure the quality of the output, to ensure product or service levels. That's the theory, and the genesis of 'quality management': whether you're measuring output code or breakfasts [1] or chemicals or widgets or medicine, you need to measure the quality of the output if there are any client specifications or expectations around the output. And there are very few cases where your customers will not have any specs or expectations around your product or service.

How you manage quality follows from those basics; it matters where you measure quality but it is so process dependent - earlier in the process lowers costs, but may not suffice to guarantee final quality - that quality management has to be designed around the specific process; balancing cost with benefit and requirements. How deep or specialized quality management becomes depends on the needs of the org, the size of the org, and the needs of the particular process.

This is why I'm skeptical about whether broad articles like this are beneficial overall. Why and how matter, and where's the foundational discussion behind why and how? Do folks not think at the organizational/business level? Maybe not everyone is a Sheryl Sandberg :-)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Output_Management

This was painful at first but I do think it's the way to go. We found that too much manual QA incentivizes devs writing features to throw it over the fence - why should they test more if someone else is paid to do it? Devs need to feel the pain of writing tests if their code is hard to test, and they need to be held accountable when their code blows up in production. This feedback loop is valuable in the long run.

Same thing for test automation. Previously we shipped this over to our in-team DevOps people and they built complicated CI/CD setups. Losing them meant we needed to simplify our stack. Took a while and it slowed down feature development, but it was worth it. Of course you need leadership who understands this and dedicates time to building this out.

In defense of DevOps, I think the landscape for automation was poor a few years back. Jenkins and Teamcity are way too complex. Github Actions (for all its warts, and there are many) is much simpler. Our pipelines are also in their own CI/CD (CDK, CodeBuild) - infrastructure as code is the key to scaling.

We still have manual QA people to test things we can't automate. Usually this is for weird surfaces such as smart TVs, or for perceptual tests. I don't see this going away any time soon, but high levels of automation elsewhere drive down the need for "catch-all" manual testing.

Moreover, the best QAs would almost always try to be not QA - to shift into a better respected and better paid field.

I wish it werent so (hence my username) but there is a definite class divide between devs and QA and it shows up not just in terms of the pay packets but also who gets the boot in down times and who gets listened to. This definitely affects the quality of people.

I think it's overdue an overhaul much like the sysadmin->devops transition.

Usually there either arent any in which case bugs get missed or there are 5 very cheap ones running mindless scripts who are standing in for the devs' inability or unwillingness to write decent automated tests but dont catch the really deep level thorny stuff.