The January SQGNE talk was “Proactive Software Quality Assurance (SQA)™ Overcomes SQA’s “Traffic Cop” Resistance”. Interesting … I know that there are organizations where Devs view SQA (under whatever name) as an obstacle, and I consider myself fortunate to have not worked for any of those.
For me, the useful thing about this talk was the reminder of all the trouble that comes from different definitions. Robin devoted quite a bit of his time to demonstrating that a roomful of software QA and test professionals produced a lot of different answers when asked to define “quality” and “quality assurance”. I’m guessing that at a lot of companies one would get similar diversity of answers, asking the same questions of developers and QA and their managers, and that a little probing would expose some different expectations about what the QA people were supposed to do
“Done” is another word where different definitions can lead to problems. I remember a time long ago when a Dev I was working with declared that the application. was done Yes, I had done functional testing and he had checked in – but the application was not yet packaged so it could be installed, and it had no help text. So maybe he was done, but that application was not.
Remember to check definitions.