For a couple unrelated reasons, I’ve been thinking of which role in an organization has the greatest impact on Quality.

The first obvious answer is that testers do, since they find and advocate for bugs while acting as an agent for the user. Except, that implies gatekeepr-ism, which is not desirable (and been explored a couple times iirc.)

The next obvious answer is that the developers do. After all they are the ones putting in the bugs in the first place. All a tester does is discover them. But even the developer can’t solely be held responsible for the code when what they are developing is a giant ball of knotted yarn.

So what is the most important role for Quality?

I’m starting to think it is the Product Owner. Think about it for a second. The Product Owner:

  • Talks to the customer
  • To find out what they need
  • Interacts with both development and test
  • By prioritizing work
  • And accepts or rejects it before it gets to the end user

All of those thing have a HUGE impact on what gets released. If the product owner is all over the place, then the product will be too. If the product owner only pays lip service to quality, it will be evident when it gets released. If the product owner doesn’t have the pulse of the consumer / market then they will be leading the project down the wrong road.

There is a whole industry around training testers to think better and to write better automation to make them more efficient. There is an even bigger industry around training developers to write (more any) tests, loosely-coupled objects, etc.. What I don’t have any insight into is what we are doing to make our Product Owners better in terms of Quality.

I suspect this might be a potential role for an evolved tester. Usually the roadmap is junior, intermediate, senior, lead, manager. Perhaps there is a fork in the road somewhere that takes you up into the business side of things where you can drive a Quality Agenda from.

Food for thought.