The Role of QA in Failure Analysis

In response to my previous post on failure analysis, some people argued to me that in their opinion it is the QA’s job to perform a Failure Analysis as part of preparing a test plan, and verify that it does indeed perform as expected by executing the tests.

QA? Really??

I ask these people – is it the QA’s job to define the required system functionality? Obviously not, and the required functionality in case of a certain failure is no different! In this context, the QA’s job is to test that the system under test behaves as expected under failure situations, where “expected” is what was defined by the customer.

Failure Analysis is Your Responsibility

I ask again – have you performed a failure analysis on your system? Go ahead. You really should!