I worked with the Software Quality Engineers at Rockwell Collins during one of my summer co-ops. It was a good introduction to software development process that you cannot match in an academic setting and gave me an edge over other new hire software engineers because I knew the process and why it was important when it was implemented correctly.

But that is the catch… it must be implemented correctly. Quality Assurance as just another hoop to jump through is a waste and the person in that job is helping nobody by signing off on anything put in front of them. The best SQEs were the ones that could actually read some code or raise questions that made the developers squirm a bit. If a developer was not confident in the answer then they would probably have some extra action items to work on later.

The check and balances that software developers can do for each other is important as well. If you have two developers working on different modules but in the same coding language, it is helpful to look over each others code for readability and documentation. This helps out the next developer who has to modify this code to either fix or expand upon it.

The biggest obstacle to this process is the ego of some older developers that were lone wolves too long. They tend to be overly defensive and very reluctant to help others trying to reuse their code or even dare fix a bug in their precious creation (or hack job… depends on their preferred method or limitations from management such as money and time). Getting comments or helpful object names in their code is a miracle. The newer code might be a bit better but the stuff before a good process was in place is minimal such as a comment with the author name and some meaningless date (create? release? revise?).

I personally think that I make a lousy tester, and so project that onto developers in general. I really appreciate the difference in mind-set that a developer and a tester has. I think that is an important part of the quality involved in our product.

Sadly, most managers that weren’t developers seem to think you can hire any Joe off the street, put them in front of a computer, and they’ll find lots of defects.