“Quality is not an act, it is a habit.”

Aristotle

In the world of software testing, there’s a lot of contention over the use of the term QA instead of testing. Often testers consider themselves to be Quality Assurance (QA) even though they don’t ensure quality, they just test it.

It actually makes more sense to call independent software testing after development Quality Control (QC) as it is simply verifying quality rather than ensuring it.

As previously stated, I believe that is is no longer sufficient to test quality in; agile software delivery teams need to build it in. A person performing a Quality Assurance role in an agile team can work closely with the team to strive to build quality in, but still can’t ensure quality actually exists (programmers can still check in bad code).

So, I propose we rename QA to mean Quality Advocate.

A Quality Advocate (QA) in an agile team advocates quality. Whilst their responsibilities include testing, they aren’t limited to just that. They work closely with other team members to build quality in, whether that be though clear, consistent acceptance criteria, ensuring adequate automated test coverage at the unit/integration level, asking for dev box walkthrough, or encouraging collaboration/discussion about doing better testing within the team.

Whilst the Quality Advocate promotes quality as part of their role: quality is everyone’s responsibility.

The benefit of doing this is that testing becomes more efficient for the Quality Advocate and a better product is produced overall as quality has been built in from the beginning.

“Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.”

Henry Ford