Testing the Waterhouse

In a lot of companies and a lot of articles that I read online, people say that QA is under estimated, that good QA doesn't get noticed enough, and they're talking about it like it's a bad thing? However, I strongly believe that good QA doesn't need to be credited, the fact that people aren't talking about QA is a good thing, it's not just that no news is good news, but far more than that. Let me give you the example of referees in football, if a referee has a good game then he's not going to be talked about, a good referee is a referee who goes unnoticed, doesn't make any bad decisions, and lets the game flow well. People aren't saying that the referee missed a blatant penalty or sent someone off. To liken this to QA, if everything goes well on a project and and the product is released without any bugs and the quality of the software at the end was of a high standard then not very often will someone say the QA was great, I think it comes ...

I was recently asked about a vision for QA over the next 12 months, where would I like QA to be and how am I planning on achieving that... I thought I'd write where I  want QA to be and document the progress over the next year or so, and hopefully achieve most, if not all, of what I want. Firstly, a big problem where I am currently is performance testing, we hand it over at the end of a project to a third party who then run performance tests on it and come back with results, there are a number of issues that are wrong with this, mainly being we are leaving something that is incredibly important right to the end of a project, so any issues are extremely difficult to fix. So the first thing I want to do is embed Performance Testing right into the sprint, and actually try and do it in an Agile way, I read a blog post here   and really want to try and achieve that, we have the tooling to do it in house, so why wouldn't we do so? Sure it will require some help from experts...

I saw this recently on an internet site I visit and it got me thinking about just how true it is... In order to achieve our goals, we more often than not have to step outside of our comfort zone in order to achieve them. What do you do to challenge yourself within QA? I take on things that I don't know much about, and learn about them as I find the best way for me to learn is by doing. A good recent example of this is working with Espresso, a new API from Google for automating tests on android devices. I didn't know anything about this before I started looking at it, and whilst I'm not a pro at it, I have experience of it, I know how to use it, and I know how to write tests using it, which is what I aimed to achieve when I picked it up at first. I'm lucky to be in a position where I can find things that challenge me on a regular basis, however I have to say, that if it ever came that I wasn't being challenged, then I would look for somewhere that was chal...