Ron WilsonIf you are in QA, I will personally guarantee you will have to justify why testing is needed. It should be a simple answer. Humans make mistakes therefore developers = humans and developers = defects. I don’t blame developers at all because I am a tester and I make mistakes. However, I find that developers don’t get asked to justify their existence. In my humble opinion, developers should have to justify their existence and they should be evaluated in the same way testing departments are. All teams including developers should provide metrics that justify their existence.
QA is usually one of the few organizations that capture metrics and this can often backfire on QA teams. With automation for example, we capture ROI to justify the spend required for the budget to create automation. Test automation is essentially development so why is that required. Anyone who knows the least bit about automating anything can make a solid business case that automation is a no brainer. However, we are forced to justify the need to spend money on developing code.
With testing misses making more mainstream news, such as the Obamacare website, hopefully IT executives will understand the need for testing and shift gears to ask other teams to justify their departments instead.
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