I was interviewed earlier this week by Rosie Sherry for a video series on Leading with Quality with the Ministry of Testing.
(Can we just pause here for a second? Because… Rosie Sherry? Interviewing me? Not to mention that the first video in the series was released and the guest is Lisa Crispin! I feel like I’m in the presence of testing royalty 👸
Whew. Ok.)
Before we started recording, Rosie mentioned something that's been stuck in my head since: "Community is care," she said, drawing a parallel to quality. "Quality is care”.
Quality is care.
Not quality needs care, or quality involves care. Quality *is* care.
Ans she’s right. It's a direct reflection of the intentional care we put into the software we build for the users we're building for. The more I think about this, the more it explains everything about why good software feels good and bad software feels... careless 🤷♀️.
When you’re using a product, you can tell whether the people who created it thought deeply about how you'd actually use it. Whether they considered the edge cases that would frustrate you. Whether they cared enough to make the error messages helpful instead of cryptic.
This is why I'm not losing sleep over AI replacing QA (at least not in the way people seem to think). I do think that the tools we use will change and the way we work will evolve. Plenty of tasks we do now will get automated. But as long as teams are building software for humans, someone needs to care intentionally about quality. Someone needs to think about impact, context, and the human experience in ways that go beyond pattern matching.
Thats something that (at least for now 😅) ChatGPT and Claude and whatever flavor of AI you prefer just can’t do. Algorithms do what we tell them to do (nondeterministically in this case, but still…). They optimize for the goals we tell them to. They follow patterns from training data. The choice to prioritize user experience over shipping fast and make judgment calls about what "good enough" means for your specific context is human.
Quality is care.