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April 30, 2005
Can we blame the QA team?
In response to my previous blog-entry, Dennis asked if the QA team was at fault.
You could easily blame it on the QA team. However, you cannot expect the QA team to be the silver bullet of quality, especially if they are working downstream of the software cylce. I do not work at Microsoft and do not know how the QA team operates there.
On all XP projects that I have been involved with, the QA team worked in tandem with the development team; incrementally deploying tested, integrated, and stable software per iteration. The QA team got actively involved from the first iteration to confirm that the product was working as per the specifications. Not only that, the QA team being part of the customer team also worked with the other customers to specify the feature set for the next iteration. I clearly recall a tester telling me, “This is the first time I feel part of the whole team”.
On a different note, if you decide to release incomplete software, you need a mechanism in place that empowers:
-the customers to feel ownership of the software and easily provide feedback in a non-disruptive fashion.
-the engineers to incorporate that feedback immediately into the development cycle and support the needs of the customers.
In the case of Business Contact Manager, I did not know of any easy built-in feedback mechanism.
Finally, here is the experience that forced me to uninstall Business Contact Manager. Yesterday, at the client side, I had to configure Outlook to connect to their internal Exchange server. The moment, I finished adding the new Exchange account to Outlook, Business Contact Manager informed me that it could not exist in the same profile as the new Exchange account, and it removed itself from that profile. Now, I was without any of my contacts in Outlook or on my PDA. This experience was just enough for me to uninstall the product.
Posted by gunjan at April 30, 2005 02:21 PM
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Tracked on June 8, 2005 04:41 AM