Is QA a career ?

[Baz Man]

Is QA widely recognised as a seperate disipline ? and do many companies
provide for QA as a career ?

I ask this question because I am very interested in finding out the
'attitude' of companies towards Software Quality Assurance, and how QA is
perceived generally.

For example, how many companies have a defined career path for testers ?

I asked a similar question once before, because I was getting the impression
that a particular companies attitude was that testing was lesser work than
programming (they had a very poor attitude towards quality aswell) and thus
people tended to be dumped into the QA dept. as a kind of a training period
prior to being moved over to the programming side. Consequently it was
impossible to develop (never mind hold onto) experienced testers, and thus
difficult to develop any sort of QA department.

I have come across this attitude to QA in several other companies (with a
few notable exceptions) and I would be interested in hearing whether others
have had this experience.

On the plus side I should mention that the advent of Y2K and the forthcoming
introduction of the Euro currency has %2522forced%2522 a re-assessment and
an improvement in the attitude of companies towards QA. Yet, I feel it is
not enough.

any comments ?



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[Bruce Epstein]

In our company SQA is a career opportunity, as is Testing. I manage both groups

here, and they are *very* different activities. (SQA deals mostly with project
management and reviews, while testing deals with the technical (non-)conformance

of the product to the specifications.)

It is true that very few people stay more than a few years in these roles, at
least
here, but they could if they wanted to. And they receive basically the same
salary
as their peers who execute other phases of the lifecycle. And when they do
transfer
to other roles, they are welcomed heartily.

I know that other companies like ours do exist. Some are "household names", but

not all well-known companies act this way. Many are in "less glamourous"
markets.
We happen to be in the automotive systems market. We're also hiring (but please
look
at the geographic address in my signature before sending anything :-).

Happy Thanksgiving.

Bruce

Baz Man wrote:

--
============================================

Bruce Epstein
Software Quality Manager
VDO Car Communication France
1, rue de Clairefontaine BP65
F-78512 Rambouillet Cedex FRANCE

Bruce....@rbt.carsys.philips.com

Telephone: +33 (0)1 34 57 76 63
Fax: +33 (0)1 34 83 70 62