When code with a major defect is released to the customer, who’s fault is it? Who do we blame? Scott Bellware just posted basically saying “it’s not the tester’s fault”. I think it’s fair enough to say that the “QA missed something” syndrome is not healthy, but neither is “there's nothing that QA has ever missed that developers didn't miss first”. The problem with the argument that “It's less of a tester's job to check that a developers' code is right, but that their tests are right” also implies that the tester didn’t “do their job” because they didn’t find the holes in the tests that lead to the defect not being caught and therefore, released.
This finger pointing usually happens in organizations where “QA” is the “gatekeeper”. Sometimes that is the role that the organization has given them or the one that they have set up for themselves. Either way they have implicitly set themselves up as being blamed for any defects that are released. Is that fair? Maybe not, but you can’t have it both ways. You can’t simultaneously be responsible for it and not get the blame.
Of course this is coming from a programmer. So what’s my point?
The attitude on an agile team should be the team missed something. And in an agile organization, “the whole organization missed something.” To pin responsibility for any particular failure on any one particular individual or role in an agile team is to absolve the other members of the team from responsibility for success or failure of the team. The attitude becomes, “if QA is responsible, I can’t get blamed.” Or conversely “if the programmer is responsible, I (the tester) can’t be blamed.” Take away the “safety net of blame” and attitudes change… but more on that in the future.
So when a defect is released, who failed? The programmer failed, the analyst failed, the tester failed, the user during UAT failed. In reality the whole team failed, agile or not.
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