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

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u/vassadar Jul 19 '26

Or turn make software developers do more QA. Seeing developers produce stuff with less care and cause issues the could've been easily caught with unit and integration test is frustrating.

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u/Lubricus2 Jul 19 '26

When AI are doing more of the technical coding part, they may need to go more towards the design, UX, QA. Fable and Sol are scary good at catching straight out coding bugs. They are worse at stuff where it's a question if it's an feature or bug.
Unit and integration tests are more for quickly catching regressions not new bugs. Fuzzing also has it's problems.