A software conference that advocates for quality

I’ve seen one company in my 30 year career with effective quality control.

The QE engineers and the development engineers were in entirely separate branches of the org chart. They had different incentive structures. The interface documentation was the source of truth.

The release cadence was slow. QE had absolute authority to stop a release. QE wrote more code than development engineers did with their tests and test automation.

Was the end result better or worse for this? I'm not being facetious, I just can't get if you think it was a good idea!

The company I work for used to be organized like this a decade or so ago, and people who were around back then still tell horror stories that we all laugh about. Things like bug targets not being met leading to extreme bug ping-pong ("you didn't specify the phase of the moon when this crash on clicking Run reproduced, Needs Information", "this GUI control is misaligned, here are 5 bugs, one for each button that is not where it should be", endless hostile discussions on the severity of bugs and so on).

Sofwtare development and quality assurance should be tightly integrated and should work together on ensuring a good product. Passing builds over a wall of documentation is a recipe for disasters, not good quality software.

I've worked at one of those companies where software quality was paramount.

They did TDD for a long time, they wrote Clean Code™, they organised meetups, sponsored and went to conferences, they paid 8th Light consultants to come teach (this was actually worth it!) and sent people to Agile workshops and certificates.

At first, I was like "wow, I am in heaven".

About a year later, I noticed so much repetition and waste of time in the processes.

Code was at a point where we had a "usecase" that calls a "repository" that fetches a list of "ItemNetworkResponse" which then gets mapped into "Item" using "ItemNetworkResponseToItemMapper" and tests were written for every possible thing and path.

They had enterprise clients, were charging them nicely, paying developers nicely and pocketed extra money due to "safety buffers" added by both engineers, managers and sales people, basically doubling the length of any project for "safety".

The company kept to their "high dev standards" which meant spending way more time, and thus costing way more, than generic cookie-cutter agencies would cost for the same project.

This was great until every client wanted to save money.

The company shut down last year.

> The interface documentation was the source of truth.

lol, fire business analysts and let tech writers do their job. Sounds like some kind of VC black company.

It sounds like they were cargo culting ThoughtWorks.

ThoughtWorks and companies like them do work but theyre heavily reliant upon heavy duty sales. Delivery at high quality is necessary but not sufficient.

Every company I’ve seen that maintains a separate QA org chart, inevitably offshores the entire QA org to India or China, with predictable results.

In 2025 I think the only thing that makes sense is having SDETs embedded in development teams.

From your description it looks like that company wasn't into quality but into chasing every fad of software industry.