The old wisdom in the US, is that if you have "Quality" in your job title, your career is over.
At the Japanese company that I used to work for, it meant that you were one of the most powerful people in the corporation, and was a sought-after adornment.
I always give the power to my QA team to block any release no matter what and to give higher priority to tickets than product manager. If CEO wants to override, I cover them and take the blame. This is not a guarantee that there will be no bugs in production, but it saved us a few times.
They never reported a "NotABug." They could back up every report, and give exact reproduction steps.
They found weird, obscure corner cases, and that was by hand (they hated automation tools).
They had 3,000-line Excel spreadsheets. If even one of those rows failed, the whole shooting match (like an entire product line) could come to a halt (so that meant they had to cross their t's, and dot their i's).
They seldom had "opinion-based" reports, and, when they did, the report was presented by the manager, after long discussions.
The company I worked for, was renowned as one of the highest-Quality optical corporations in the world.
I worked with NTT Docomo years ago for a short time. First time I ever got to see a CMM Level 5 organization. It was insane. No wonder Japanese cars were so much better than everyone else for so long.
If you ever get the chance, take it - you will learn way more about software quality than you thought existed!
Heh, this reminds me of an episode of Top Gear I was watching years ago about quality of British cars. They said something along the lines of "The manufacture sais 'eh, good enough' the moment the car is able to move under its own power.
Do you have any insights into why desktop and mobile software from these companies is so universally horrible? I’m thinking of Canon’s remote tethering tools, Fuji’s instax and remote control apps for iOS, and Epson’s scanner software.
I don't want to get into slagging these folks, but I feel your pain. In a big way.
Hardware != software.
Hardware companies have a really difficult time, understanding this. They insist on running in-house software projects as waterfall-based-measure-twice-cut-once-never-accept-a-bug-count-greater-than-0.
Anything different is "bad quality cowboy."
It can be difficult. I rapidly learned not to use the word "agile," within earshot of many senior types.
This applies to US hardware companies, as well as Japanese ones.
Most folks, hereabouts, seem to think of me as an unbearable, retentive, snob, but my former managers would often think of me as an undisciplined, reckless, slob.
At the Japanese company that I used to work for, it meant that you were one of the most powerful people in the corporation, and was a sought-after adornment.
Different strokes, and all that...