The one with colleagues not knowing what QA means

So here it goes... It was day 1 on my new company. I came in early where breakfast was prepared for newcomers like me. In fact, there were only two newcomers including myself, and the other guy was an Englishman who will be working in sales.

During the kick-off meeting, we needed to introduce ourselves including what our roles will be, some background about ourselves, and some hobbies. Well for the sales guy, it was pretty straightforward. He introduced himself and that he will be working for the UK sales team. Everyone knew right away what he will be doing.

Then came my turn. I repeated my name and told everyone that I will be working as a Lead QA Engineer. "A what now?" kind of expression was what I got from everyone. 80% of my new colleagues looked back at me with blank faces. 19% probably have some rough idea what QA is and most of them are from the engineering team. The rest, or 1%, were the ones whom I would be directly working with and probably were the ones responsible for hiring me in the first place.

Lunch came and I was with a mix of dev guys and some support engineers. One of the support engineers probably had a question mark hanging over her since that morning's company introduction, asked me candidly, "So actually what will you be doing?" (say it in a french accent and it will sound sexier and more candid).

I then explained to her that QA stands for Quality Assurance and I am here to put in processes to improve the quality of our platform. I also told her about the different testing activities that can be implemented to achieve that and even gave her a lot more technical details like BDD/TDD, automation testing, integration testing, etc.

Right there and then, I realized, she was more confused than before she asked the question. So I just simply told her that I am here to find bugs and hopefully find them earlier before it goes out of production. She noddingly responded and said, well that sounds like what we needed badly here. Finally, she roughly got the expected output and goal of my mission but did not entirely get the complexity and difficulty in arriving at that goal.

And so came the idea of writing the next series of articles. Answering those questions a lot of people in a tech company ask, what is QA and why do we need it?

In the coming days and weeks, I will try to answer them in as many details as I can in a series of articles so as not to bore you with a very long detailed explanation of the whats and the whys of QA... so stay tuned.