Sales Cred Is Not Street Cred
In an otherwise tolerable article entitled “Defect Tracking Lacks Appeal But its importance is at a premium” about how defect tracking can serve other useful functions in addition to the already useful function of taunting developers using a database backend, the author inserts this howler:
Nathan Rawlins is yet another bug-tracking pundit who declared process to be more essential than ever. Rawlins’ role gives him sufficient street cred to make that claim. He is a senior director of product marketing at San Mateo, Calif.-based Serena Software, a company that generated more than US$250 million in revenue in fiscal year 2007 selling application life-cycle management software, a category that includes defect tracking.
To those of us in the trenches, sitting in a corner office in San Mateo evangelizing a software product does not give one street cred in QA. Scars from lessons learned meetings, QA lab tattoos, and large number of bug-shaped decals on one’s cubicle wall, each representing a stack trace eliicited, now that gives you QA street cred.
