Developer Note: The Roles of QA, IT, and Developers

Close cooperation is needed in vendor organizations to deliver NMS products. Developers should delegate the administration of NEs to IT and also involve QA in every step of the development process. Developers should also learn to acquire deep testing ability in order to ensure that the software delivered to QA does not fail. In such a scheme, QA really is assuring quality rather than simply carrying out what often amounts to software integration testing. Developers should already have successfully completed the latter. Developers then become true knowledge workers ”delegating NE administration to the experts (IT) and partnering with QA to ensure solution development. A further development of this might be to involve customer engineers in the QA process. The motivation for this is the rapid development of high-grade network management solutions.