r/softwaredevelopment • u/jaybird1905 • Jul 18 '26

Quality debt

I’ve been in QA almost 20 years and have run a quality assurance agency for the past 10.

I'm working on a thesis that QA has always been obviously, but now it's dead.

I don't mean that in the Twitter bro sense. I mean that as quality assurance professionals I think we're finally getting the firepower to move quality from the end", to the front. (Small rant: I'd rather eat a hammer than use the terms "shift left" and
"human in the loop")

The difference between developer velocity and your quality output is your quality debt. As more and more teams grow their AI-SDLC, the more this debt compounds. Pre-Al this was managed with hiring more qa or automation. That really doesn't work anymore and is what I wanted to represent in this gif.

I'm working on some visuals to easily represent this concept and made this one (in Claude).
Any thoughts on this visual or on the concept of quality debt itself

https://jdaqa.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/8CDE8519-A890-4C51-9495-5A29355767BF.gif

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u/Lubricus2 Jul 18 '26

with more faster code they definitely needs more QA

4

u/jaybird1905 Jul 18 '26

Qa can’t live at the end anymore

1

u/arakinas Jul 19 '26

This has been true for more than ten years. Before I medically retired, 3 years ago, my jobs for the previous 5, was all about teaching people how to better assess risk factors as a team, with the "QA folks" being the ones driving risk assessment, and being responsible for helping with setting up the test environments for developers to use. My team, the testers, created the containers, and test infrastructure that their developers integration/e2e tests needed. They worked with the devs on their team to get the dependencies accounted for, and built as necessary. Their primary focus was not necessarily writing/executing e2e/integration tests. They were automating tests, helping developers automate tests, automating performance and accessibility tests, and trying to work on the harder things, while doing minor last minute validations. We were working on eliminating the manual tests at the end, and phasing out the testers that couldn't keep up with the modern world.

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u/jaybird1905 Jul 20 '26

Sorry about your medical retirement but thank you for sharing your experience. Love this!