The following are difficult archetypes within a quality assurance/testing organization:

• The Firehose
• The Blamer
• The Alarmist
• The Scientist
• The Misleader
• The Downtrodden
• The Random Clicker
• The Flippant

In a Software Development organization, the job of the Quality Assurance team is to find bugs in the software. How exactly bugs are found varies from team-to-team, but it typically involves staff familiar with the software using it in ways that would reveal bugs the software developers might have missed.

The term “Quality Assurance” may refer to: the process of assuring quality; the organization that assures quality; as well as an individual tester within that organization. It is common to refer to a software tester in the Quality Assurance organization as a “QA”. For this section, to keep with convention, I will use common shorthand of “QA” instead of the more accurate “Quality Assurance Tester”.

How much accountability the QA team takes for the total quality of the project varies from company to company, which sometimes makes “Quality Assurance” something of a misnomer, as they only measure the quality in terms of number of bugs found, rather than assure it.