Do you believe it's a good idea for Software Engineers to have to work as Quality Assurance Engineers for some period of time?

Posted by Macy Abbey on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Macy Abbey
Published on 2010-11-27T01:03:36Z Indexed on 2011/11/23 2:07 UTC
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I believe it is. Why?

I've encountered many Software Engineers who believe they are somehow superior to QA engineers. I think it may help quench this belief if they do the job of a QA engineer for some time, and realize that it is a unique and valuable skill-set of its own.
The better a Software Engineer is at testing their own programs, the less cost in time their code incurs when making its way through the rest of the software development life-cycle.
The more time a Software Engineer spends thinking about how a program can break, the more often they are to consider these cases as they are developing them, thus reducing bugs in the end product.
A Software Engineer's definition of "complete" is always interesting...if they have spent time as a QA engineer maybe this definition will more closely match the designer of the software's.

What do you all think?

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