I recently spotted a five-year-old blog post by Mike Gualtieri of Forrester, where he suggests firing your quality assurance (QA) team to improve your quality. He got the idea from a client who actually tried and succeeded with this counterintuitive move.
The thinking goes that without a QA team to cover for them, developers are more likely to take care of quality properly – or risk getting the dreaded Sunday morning wakeup call to fix something.
Gualtieri’s post generated modest buzz at the time, but since 2011 the world has changed. DevOps has turned a corner, representing an end-to-end rethink of how organizations handle the entire software development lifecycle.
Now that 2016 has finally arrived, it’s time to take a fresh look at the question. But why stop with QA? Now that we have DevOps – and digital transformation more broadly – whom else can we fire?