Every day, I hear from frustrated quality assurance (QA) managers who’ve been informed by project management that their six-week testing schedule has been reduced to two weeks or less. It usually involves some sob story about how the development team is a month late because of the customer’s last-minute changes (Isn’t it always someone else’s fault?). The testing team is expected to suck up the lost time and get their testing done in a fraction of the originally scheduled time.I typically ask them, “What have you done to prevent this from happening?” The manager usually explodes from sheer pressure and dumps a laundry list of reasons for the project’s poor condition—management committed to a date before the project even kicked off. There are problems with the requirements—either they’re nonexistent, vague, incomplete, or not well documented. There are problems with the involvement of the quality resources, such as being left out of key meetings. There are problems with the development team producing unit-tested code. There are problems with ever-changing requirements and a lack of concern for managing the rate or scope of the changes.

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