SOFTWARE QUALITY · PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE · FIELD NOTES

Quality Assurance

Ideas, methods, lessons, and practical perspectives on the discipline of quality assurance—throughout the software development lifecycle and across the organizations that build and maintain systems.

Process & Governance Testing & Validation Careers & Practice

THE BIGGER PICTURE

Quality is a systems discipline.

Assurance connects process quality, evidence, reliability, safety, and effective decision-making. It is not synonymous with testing.

Chalkboard diagram of interdependent quality assurance, safety, and reliability functions, with independent oversight and communication across the software development lifecycle — Original conceptual illustration informed by the Rogers Commission's discussion of NASA's Safety, Reliability and Quality Assurance functions—not an official NASA diagram. Historical context: The Silent Safety Program. Open the image to inspect it at full size.

AREAS OF PRACTICE

The whole profession.

Quality systems & processes

Requirements, governance, lifecycle quality, traceability, audits, metrics, and continuous improvement.

Testing & validation

Test design, exploratory investigation, automation, verification, risk-based testing, and evidence.

Delivery & the real world

Release management, cross-functional collaboration, production readiness, lessons learned, and tradeoffs.

Careers & professional practice

Entering QA, career development, judgment, communication, tooling, and the evolving profession.

QA FIELD NOTES

Latest writing

Ongoing articles and field notes on quality assurance in practice.

The first QA Field Notes article is being prepared. New entries will appear here automatically when published.