Several years ago, as a consultant, I had the opportunity to work with a client on modernizing their Quality Assurance processes. At the time, I was at the phase of my career where I viewed QA as just ‘testers’. They were sort of secondary characters in a play that starred programmers. Like the ponies in the Lord of the Rings. Important, sure, but they didn’t get their own swords or anything.
So I took a deep dive in to Quality and started at (close to) the beginning, with W.E. Demming. He was one of the first Quality gurus, and became known for his work in Japan following WWII (he has a wikipedia page). The one thing that really resonated with me from researching him was his idea that you had to drive out fear from engineering. At the time, I was still in the ‘bugs are bad’ phase, and because of that, made all the classic mistakes in programming. I wasn’t good at testing my own work, and wasn’t particularly good at telling our testers where to look for bugs. I also viewed testers more as impediments to my amazing software being released than as allies. Continue reading “Fear and Software”