Testing and Quality are NOT correlated.

Software testing and quality aren’t necessarily correlated. Quality is the product of the culture in the company, the teams, and the capabilities of different individuals. Your contributions as an individual tester can influence quality if you're lucky, but sometimes they don't. Why is that?

For one, as a tester, you don’t have full control over which issues get fixed or not, or which features (that users might really want!) get built or not. You also don’t create the designs and the UX of the software. Likewise, you cannot control whether a developer writes sloppy code. Yes, you can have influence over all these things by providing feedback, but not control. There’s a crucial difference.

Calling yourself Quality Control or Quality Assurance is opening yourself up to criticism for things that are beyond your control. I’d almost go as far and say that these job titles steer the way people perceive testing in the wrong direction. Information Bringer, Insight Giver or Reality Checker would better describe what a tester does. Influencing the quality in a good way is an added bonus that isn't guaranteed to happen.

The larger trend regarding quality

Speaking of quality, the trend these past few years has firmly gone in the direction of: speed. We need to release faster, more often, while preferably not introducing new issues (tech debt, bugs, dark patterns, bad UX, to name a few examples). Slap the current trend of gen-AI on top of this, and you have a recipe for anti-quality.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think quality is about craftsmanship. That takes time. It requires you to ponder, to have an incredible eye for detail, to polish whatever it is you are working on. In today's IT landscape, none of these things are rewarded or focused on. And it shows, by the amount of shitty software out there.

I'm sure testers have been involved in a lot of projects and products that I perceive as "shitty software", and their work did not stop the garbage from going live. It happened to me as well. I have worked in projects that contained known anti-quality things (dark design patterns, as mandated by marketing, to name an example) and I couldn't do shit to stop those from going live. The only thing I did was test, share my findings to the people in charge, share my opinion on them, to then be ignored and for our users to hate the new additions.

So yeah, I'd never directly tie my role to a promise or guarantee of better quality software. That's not how the cookie crumbles, at all.

Let me know your thoughts.