Do you believe it's a good idea for Software Engineers to have to work as Quality Assurance Engineers for some period of time?
- by Macy Abbey
I believe it is. Why?
I've encountered many Software Engineers who believe they are somehow superior to QA engineers. I think it may help quench this belief if they do the job of a QA engineer for some time, and realize that it is a unique and valuable skill-set of its own.
The better a Software Engineer is at testing their own programs, the less cost in time their code incurs when making its way through the rest of the software development life-cycle.
The more time a Software Engineer spends thinking about how a program can break, the more often they are to consider these cases as they are developing them, thus reducing bugs in the end product.
A Software Engineer's definition of "complete" is always interesting...if they have spent time as a QA engineer maybe this definition will more closely match the designer of the software's.
What do you all think?