What is QA anyway?

Things have been shuffling (again) at the company I work for.

This is particularly annoying for my team because upper management is constantly reassessing and changing our priorities and assignments.

One of the reasons I'm still here is that I enjoy working with my team. We know how to work together, we complement each other's skills well. All of them are more senior than me—one of them got his first job the year I was born. That's a good thing. I rather be the least experienced of a team so that I'm forced to level up.

So, with such a great team, if priorities change, we adapt swiftly and refocus our energy. Again, and again, and again.

Yesterday, we were told that plans are changing (again). Instead of working on the much-needed framework to replace the low quality and unreliable stuff delivered by our sister company in Sweden, we are now responsible for “Quality assure” the software that is planned to be deployed this Summer.

In other works, they expect us to somehow fix all the garbage delivered by the other company instead of building a new reliable solution by ourselves and then sever our dependency on them. They believe that's the safest approach, but, actually, that's the most risky.

During that meeting, I asked this manager: What exactly do you mean by QA? His answer was: “We still need to define it”.

QA is such a broad term that it means completely different things in different industries, companies, and even contexts within the same company.

When a manager asks for something, and then he is unable to explain the meaning of the words he uses, something is wrong.

On top of that, if he doesn't listen to what we have to say on the matter—we're the engineers who are going to build/fix the thing in the end—I know that's not going to end well.

Maybe it is time to read the pile of messages at LinkedIn again; I want to be out before the shit hits the fan, life is too short.

#Work