Quality has new meaning – it is shit

I do not find that title implied to me; but see it almost everyday being implied to others.

This is in a continuation to a post a while back. In that post, I talked about a project team and their view point on quality. Here is an addition to the same set of people. The conversation goes like

Project Manager: I was just checking on the defect count and noticed we have 24 open P1 and P2 in system. How are we are going to go live tomorrow. What just happened?

QA Manager 1: Nothing, it is just that my team currently does not have any work for Release 2. They had some time on their hands and hence pro-actively they started to test in R1 and logged these defects.

Project Manager 1: so what are you going to do?

QA Manager 1: Nothing, these are not R1 defects. Testing is closed. We wrapped that last week and all these have tobe logged in R2. These are not R1 defects.

Everyone else in the room which included Analyst, and Project Managers laughed about it and joked that this is funny and defects have to go away.

This was the last point of discussion in the meeting and I was shell shocked to say anything. Not that it would have mattered to these guys. I am responsible for the delivery of a different project and not the modules they were talking about. So, amongst all politics and shock I did not say anything. But, I was thinking what happened to quality here.

One of them was the QA Manager, who is responsible for quality of the project and she said “Testing is closed”. How would we feel if Toyota or Honda or any car manufacturer would say that decide to fix problems in the next batch or version of the car.

And what amuses me is that these discussions reach people who are Director IT and Vice President IT and they are in agreement of the fact that “Testing is closed”