Scrum took my QA !

We have adopted scrum methodologies that seem to be really great at making everyone on the team an equal. Regardless of particular domains that need to be addressed like testing, there are no sub-teams in the development team. Although we have brought QA early in the agile process, there is no particular QA role. Actually we have embedded them in our teams. [Editor’s note: e.g. XAP's collocation]

"Accountability belongs to the development team as a whole" - Scrum that!

Much like an active-active high-availability distributed cluster (of people). Everyone is active at "doing" to get things done. Add some monitoring, a coordinator, maybe a leader election - and you've got a self-sufficient team, releasing milestones on-time and with quality.

But what about those extra tasks - performance tests, large cluster tests, system tests, usability tests, etc. What about all the evolving roles of QA Lead, QA Analyst, QA Engineer - where are they now?

In terms of QA, we don’t have a QA person any longer. We might have a person who specializes in QA but has numerous other talents. We have a dedicated development team filling up those extra spots, to make the product spotless.

But we miss our QA person! We miss this person so much we automated the tasks and called it Newman - "because the tests never stop". Newman is our guy! But there is so much you can teach a mailman... That is why we need a human.

Tell me what your "Newman" can do in the comments below. Do you also miss your QA person? please share your thoughts.

P.S. Passionate about quality? Are you proud to be a QA? we are hiring! see GigaSpaces XAP