Bulldozer00's Blog

How can someone effectively judge quality of content when they have no idea, nada, of what that content means? Well, they can’t. No matter how hard they try, and how sincere they are, they just can’t. People that are placed in those types of positions end up doing the best they can, which is judging the container that houses the content.

In technical companies that have separate Quality Assurance (QA) and Test groups, that’s often what the QA members end up doing – judging containers and not contents. The testers judge the contents (which adds value) and the QA group judges the containers (which doesn’t add value).

It’s not the QA group’s fault, it’s just the way the system IS. Even the managers who structure their companies in this costly and inefficient way aren’t fully at fault. That’s because customers, especially government bureaucracies, often require a separate QA silo group before they will do business with you. In a perverted way, it gives them a false sense of safety that the product or service they receive will be of high quality.

Since I’m a firm believer in POSIWID (the Purpose Of a System Is What It Does), then I propose to change the name of all non-test QA groups to FORM-ASS, which is short for: the “FORMat ASSurance” group. Since the FORM-ASS acronym more directly reflects what they do, it is a better fit, dontcha think?