"QA" vs. "QE"

I've been doing software testing for close to twenty years now. Throughout my career, I've generally had "QA" somewhere in my title, followed by the word "engineer" or "manager". Once it was preceded by "Director", but that was one of those puffed-up start-up titles that is intended to impress the rubes (and maybe myself) rather than really mean anything.

So, for example, I might be a Senior QA Engineer or a QA Manager or what-have you -- "QA" meaning "Quality Assurance" of course.

I left the MathWorks (the MATLAB folks) in 1994, after having three different titles with "QA" in them. Some time after that, they changed the title of the group, and the identifier common to its practitioners, from "QA" to "QE" ("Quality Engineering"). I understand that that nomenclature has gained some traction out there in the wider world, too.

I really don't like that terminology.

I have to admit, part of it is just a negative first reaction. I have negative first reaction in a big way in general, and definitely to this name change in particular "OK, you're going to change what you call my job? There has to be some ulterior motive. And $%^# you, by the way," says my inner voice. (My inner voice is a real %^#$*@, in case you need that explanation.) If I slow down and try to think it through a little more, changing the title of the function from "QA" to "QE" smacks of the old joke about the trash guy calling himself a "sanitation engineer". The first step goes "everybody knows that people with low-status jobs try to bling up their titles to impress people, and everybody sees right through it." The second step goes "why would people want to start calling the function 'Quality Engineering' unless they want to ensure that it remains perceived as a junior-varsity discipline because everyone's going to see the blinging-up of the title as exactly the same thing as what the trash guy is doing?"

It doesn't help that I have to hear people outside of software testing trot out some condescending-sounding argument like "Well, now that you quality guys are doing some real engineering, you should have a real-engineering title." Excuse me, I've actually been doing hypothesis testing and applied philosophy all this time, says my inner voice, so take your "real engineering" and ... well you can probably imagine the general idea of what my inner voice says.

I mean, really. It's bad enough that almost everyone in software thinks he knows what QA is supposed to do, and when we're not doing exactly what they think we should be, they think it's some kind of competence or learning-curve problem and they "explain" their (often incomplete, inefficient, and/or just plain screwed-up) idea in a condescending way as if they're helping me out. OK, so if you're not going to let me own the job I'm doing, at least let me own its $%^&*^ title.