QA has always been about risk management. There are multiple ways to manage risk, and some of those ways can be more cost effective to a business. As software shifted towards SaaS offerings, deployments (and rollbacks) became quicker, customer feedback loops also got lightning fast. Team's can manage the risk of a bug more efficiently by optimizing for mean-time-to-recovery. This muscle is not one that QA teams are particularly optimized for, thus their effectiveness in this new model was reduced. I've found that holding on to QA function in this environment can severely dilute the ownership of quality as a requirement from engineers.
QA is still extremely valuable in any software that has long deployment lead times. Mobile apps, On-Prem solutions, anything that cannot be deployed or rolled back within minutes can benefit from a dedicated QA team that can manage the risk appropriately.
There are so so many instances where "rolling back" is just not a feasible solution. Working for a SaaS company with mobile/web/api and huge db's, migrations, payroll uses in the product, rolling back is and should always be a LAST RESORT. In 99% of the cases, something significant enough to want to roll back usually results in a "hot patch" workflow instead because rolling back or etc has its own risk.
> QA has always been about risk management.
100%.
QA should be related to identifying risk, likelihood of failure, impact of failure to user, client and company. The earlier this is done in the varying processes, the better. ("shift left" but I've seen a ton of differences with how people describe this, but generally QA should start getting involved in the "design phase")
Another example from my own first-hand experience:
A company I worked for made a product that plugged into machines that were manufacturing parts, and based on your parameters it would tell you whether or not the part was "good" or "bad".
When interviewing the leadership of the company, as well as the majority of the engineering group, "what is the biggest risk with this product" they all said "if the product locks up!". Upon further discussion, I pulled out a much larger, insidious risk; "what if our product tells the client that the part is 'good' when it is not?"
In this example, the part could be involved in a medical device that keeps someone alive.
QA is still extremely valuable in any software that has long deployment lead times. Mobile apps, On-Prem solutions, anything that cannot be deployed or rolled back within minutes can benefit from a dedicated QA team that can manage the risk appropriately.