Surprised To Find Bugs

The company has finally managed to create a QA department. At last, all the problems with customers discovering nasty bugs are solved! Just let the QA department test everything before it is shipped, and the bugs will be found and fixed. This company will never ship broken software again!

(Some time passes)

The QA people have longer and longer lists of bugs. Just keeping the bug lists up to date takes lots of time. The developers don't have the time to fix bugs, since they're expected to deliver new features at the same rate as before. They are also not very excited about fixing bugs. The developers start avoiding the QA people. They in turn start to distrust the developers.

Somehow, it seems like everyone was SurprisedToFindBugs.

See also: BigBangTesting

More than once I've been working for PointyHairedBosses who put together a QA department and then insisted that all developers stop doing testing. "Testing is the responsibility of the QA Department" they say... and they expect to double developer productivity.

Of course the result is, inevitably... Plenty of bugs shipping to customers. -- JeffGrigg

I've SeenThisPattern in a major project I took part in. This, along with vicious corporate politics in both the contractor and the client, and the most spectacularly mismanaged data collection and analysis process I've ever encountered, caused the project (a Y2K cleanup for a major corporation with a 24-month schedule - 4 of which were slated to end after 1 Jan 2000) to grind to a halt almost as soon as it began. After four months in which a team of 40 programmers and testers in an expensive new secure lab facility were left idled at the company's expense, a cycle of layoffs, pinkslips and reorganizations over another four months killed the project by inches (or so I was told - I went out the door in the first round of layoffs, and heard the rest second-hand). The only good thing I can say about it was that was the easiest 20K I ever made.

Worse still was the company where the President, after reading an article in InfoWeek? (his sole source for information on computers, it seems) which badly misrepresented MicroSoft's beta-testing policies, announced that we would do no testing - none at all - but instead ship it as-is, and 'let the users test it for us.' His exact words were "we will test no software before it ships'. You can imagine the disaster that resulted from this policy. - JayOsako

CategoryTesting CategoryQuality