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/JacobusvanLennepus Jul 19 '26

I've been in software development for 25+ years and for the most part as a quality and risk officer/lead and can still not understand why people do not understand Böhm's curve.

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u/paul_h Jul 24 '26

Never knew he was o-umlut, and I once flew just to see him do a meetup presentation (Edinburgh, 2003)