Getting Serious About Testing

I had a brief discussion with the guy who's sort of in charge of my project this week. The basics of the beef center around the support network the my company has [not] set up for my development team. Among other things, I am upset because our QA team isn't doing enough automated testing.

Here's a message to all you project/product/development/team managers out there. Your developers find it insulting when you don't take their work seriously, and choosing not to perform proper QA is one of the surest ways to get them to feel this way.

The rationale goes a little something like this:

"I do good work. If my company recognizes that I do good work, they will ask me to do important work (important as in 'important to the business'). If the work that I'm doing is important, my company will support me (with QA, among other thigns), so that the products I produce are the best products they can be. If the work that I'm doing is not important enough to do proper QA on, get me working on something that IS important - I want to be working on something that IS important. If I'm not doing important work, my comapny must not feel that I do work that's as good as I think it is, and they don't want me to do important work. If I'm not doing important work, I don't know why I'm doing anything."

We do automated unit testing (although we recently broke that part of our build process and are in the midst of redoing that stuff - it is there though) but it's no excuse for automated acceptance testing. I suspect many mangers don't realise the difference.