I Do Love Software Quality Assurance

I've always felt like I got lucky when I fell into the Software Quality Assurance career field. As I've written previously, I completed a Computer Science degree while in the USAF but realized quickly that I did not have the patience to be a programmer. I can read code and follow the logic used and have done so on projects using a variety of programming languages; I just find it difficult to build programs myself. I don't know if it's a deficiency in me or I just never had an instructor present things in a way that made the light go on for me. My best bet is to take a block of code (such as HTML), play with it, see what the results are, tweak some things then look again. It's not efficient but it allows me to do some things and learn as I go.

I started in Quality Assurance through a nationwide Defense Logistics Agency training program. The DoD was in the forefront of implementing Software Quality Assurance programs and I liked the idea of being a pioneer. The DoD programs concentrated on controlling the process in order to control the product. For most QA "commodities" (textiles or hardware development for example), during the Engineering development phase of a project, QA is pretty hand off since there are always modifications to processes up until production. For Software though, if you wait for the production phase, all the software has been developed already so there's nothing to monitor for the most part. Software is nebulous, ephemeral even, as you can't pick up the bits and bytes that go into a program while it is being developed. So you use the things like Requirements reviews, Design reviews, Code inspections, and so on during the code development to monitor the quality of the product.

I was placed at a Defense Contracts Administration Service, Plant Representation Office (DCASPRO) at a GTE facility. I had occasional battles with the various GTE folks on most every program they had but knew always, that the processes and procedures they used worked. They had empirical evidence. I was told a few years later when the idea of the Capability Maturity Model was hitting the literature that this particular facility was one of the handful of organizations worldwide deemed to be operating at a CMM Level 3. Probably my biggest surprise after I left DLA was just how many firms continued to fight the idea of robust SQA programs and processes. Which goes back to the lack of respect often accorded to Quality Assurance within a lot of organizations.

So What About "Unofficial" Skills?

I'm fairly certain most all of us have "unofficial" skills that we've had training for or learned through the years. These are the skills that we don't put on our formal resumes but they are skills we've used on the job. Or maybe skills from jobs we had when were in school.

For me, these skills include the typing and data entry skills. Or going w-a-y back, skills from using old fashioned key punch machines (when I first got out of the Air Force, I listed "experience with IBM 026 and 129 Keypunch machines" on my first resumes - until I had a hiring manager quip "I thought all of those were in the Smithsonian").

We all have these skills but often do not list them all as part of the personal CV, whether due to space limitations or just the lack of relevance to the position(s) being applied for. For example, I've worked on numerous proposals in response to Requests For Proposals (RFPs) for Federal, State, and Local Government contracts. Sometimes, it was as little as revising my resume for submission with the proposal, highlighting where and how my skills matched the potential client needs or as much as being the Proposal Manager making sure the final proposal met all the stated criteria so that we could be considered "responsive." It sounds fairly straight forward but is often quite difficult. A lot of organizations put a page limit (excluding resumes) on the body of a proposal. The most stringent I can recall was for a DoD project one time for a multi-year contract for a communications system that was valued at, if I remember correctly, $25M. The page limit was 50 pages. Most of the time in DoD, we were limited to 100 pages so with only half the space to make our case, we had to be very succinct and straightforward.