Concepts in my brain aren’t hierarchical. They act more like floating Venn diagrams that sometimes subsume, blend or ricochet around in my head. It’s taken me a long time to fully clarify my thoughts around software quality and the industry in general – but I think I have it now. The foxes are guarding the henhouse and they have been for my entire career.
For those of you who are not familiar with the idiom, Grammerist.com defines it as:
“The fox guarding the hen house describes a set of circumstances in which someone who should not be trusted has been chosen to protect someone or oversee a situation. The choice involves someone directly unsuitable for the task, such as choosing a bank robber to guard a bank.”
The emphasis is mine. Software is present in nearly every part of our modern lives. From birth to death now you will find that nearly every experience you can have as human is influenced by the content, context and functionality of software. And yet, my perception as an industry veteran is that the quality of the software that we use is in a free-fall. I won’t repeat Cory Doctorow’s word for it - but you can read all about that here.
There’s a running joke in software companies that the first department to lay off in tough times is the Marketing team and then the QA team right after that. That should give some indication about how many companies regard the quality of the of their products. But let’s do a quick survey of the FAANG companies that are so revered for their software. Do they have C-suite folks with a primary responsibility for quality?
(Facebook) Meta: https://about.meta.com/media-gallery/executives/ Not now. Probably not ever.
Amazon: https://ir.aboutamazon.com/officers-and-directors/default.aspx No.
Apple: https://www.apple.com/leadership/ Nobody there primarily responsible for quality. Got that Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives covered though…
Netflix: https://ir.netflix.net/governance/Leadership-and-directors/default.aspx Negatory.
C’mon Google - I mean Alphabet - I mean irony. They don’t have a clear list, really. Just a set of Executive Committees - https://abc.xyz/investor/board-and-governance/ Let’s see what Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of Search, has to say about the matter in a recent article on CNBC:
“If there’s a clear and present market reality, we need to twitch faster, like the athletes twitch faster,”
Well, OK then – not sure how that squares in reality with another quote from him in the same article:
“People come to us because we are trusted,” Raghavan said. “They may have a new gizmo out there that people like to play with but they still come to Google to verify what they see there because it is the trusted source and it becomes more critical in this era of generative AI.”
Got it. Trustworthy twitching. Speaking of reality, you can’t, and you shouldn’t trust these companies so blindly. There is ultimately no accountability to their customers for the quality of their products, or the security and privacy of your data - because you are their primary product. The personal information you share with them every second of your waking and sleeping life is and has been their primary business asset for some time now.
Again. During my time in big corporations, it used to be a running joke. I would have interactions with peer engineers and managers and come away muttering “I quit” under my breath. At one point I would just come into the office in the morning and start our QA meeting by saying – I quit. It gets laughs all the way up until the day I mean it.
I used to love testing. Finding bugs used to be a thrill only equaled by finding the perfect vintage computer part down at RE-PC or finding a Warhol Apple logo print at a thrift store. Over the last 30 years it’s become a bit of a curse. I find bugs everyday - in nearly every system I interact with.
Find me a software company with an executive whose primary function is to maintain quality and quality processes. I couldn’t find one. The best you can do is find an executive that says they care about quality, but when quarterly earnings are on the line – they will all cut corners - probably starting with marketing. They don’t need it because they already know you intimately. It’s an industry-wide crisis that no one talks about. But, I’ve seen some -redacted- and I’m saying something now.
I’ve finally got a theme for my QA book, and I’m going to get it out of me so I can move forward.