As originally defined by Atlassian, the Quality Assistance Model promotes the ownership of quality and testing by every engineer on the team, regardless of their role. This allows each engineer to develop code, test it, and release it to production without gatekeeping by a quality team or quality engineer.
Then what do testers do? Under the Quality Assistance Model, you use your testing expertise to guide and educate the team, empowering and influencing them to produce high quality software.
Sharing quality and testing responsibilities across the team spreads the testing workload more evenly and gives testers time to:
- Build testing infrastructure
- Fill gaps in test automation
- Explore new tools and techniques
- Monitor production performance
- Conduct exploratory testing, ensuring sapient investigation of your product that automated tests cannot provide
- Support developers on their team, or even on other teams
