Industry Wide Technical Debt
https://twitter.com/smariapena/status/1121120093201555458
- Accessibility automation
- Observability tooling
- Testability
- Advanced monitoring and telemetry
- Testing in Production
- Agile
- DevOps
- DevSecOps
- Red teams
- Bug Bounties
- Chaos Monkey Testing
- Resiliency Engineering
Etc, and on and on. Any test/QA professional that has bothered to study their profession will tell you that these things have been around the whole time. Hidden in plain sight. Just now coming into maturity as they have been figured out and discovered beyond the test department.
We've been talking to ourselves. Screaming at the walls that we are kept behind or sometimes hide behind. Our ranks have been filled with Peter Principle managers and Peter Pan technologists.
Instead of following our pioneers and implementing a Weinbergian reality of the top contributors being in charge of quality and testing, we've had decades of test/qa being staffed up and outsourced to the lowest bidder and otherwise defanged.
I'm not blaming Ruritania but the companies and orgs that made it happen. All these years of progress lost because management had a fundamental misunderstanding of the role and need. Did not appreciate that a contributor that wasn't directly tasked with developing a feature might have value. That they might know better. And when they hired unskilled folks to do it, of course they found themselves correct.
Think of where we would be as an industry if this grand faux paus hadn't have happened.