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And here we see the software industry reaping what it has sown.

We call our developers "rock stars" and "ninjas". Despite that fact that many of them are just writing an if or switch block that decides which function in someone else's library should be called.

But nobody seems to call their QA staff flattering names, despite the fact that they're just as important in the process.

QA staff should be highly regarded. They should have some technical understanding, so that they can help better describe errors.

There are typically two extremes for how QA should be run - the first is that they should just be literate and able to communicate, but need no technical ability. That QA is a kind of user testing. The other extreme is that QA should be technical - or able to be. That they should do more than just running through scripts, but should also be doing things like fuzz testing.

I tend towards the latter. The more you allow the developers to have responsibility for testing (beyond unit tests), the more that implementing the testing - or responding to its results - gets delayed in favour of implementing features. It's just the usual politics. If an organisation has a QA team, it should move as much testing into that team as is possible, in order to avoid the inevitable perpetual sweeping under carpets of issues by the development team. And that means having a more technical, capable QA team.

But we call our developers flattering names, and strip the QA budget whenever it's convenient to.

So is it any wonder that Uncle Sam's not convinced QA testing isn't a skilled job? The industry doesn't seem convinced either...