Dear QA,
I have to say I've been quite fond of you personally and have enjoyed our working together very much. I hope that you will take it as a friendly correction when I tell you that you need to become a stupid paranoiac b*tch.
You present yourself as do many women of our age - responsible but perhaps not very assertive. When one of our engineers tells you that something unexpected is OK, he can often convince you to let it go. Similarly when a task turns out much more labor intensive than you anticipated. You both smile at each other and feel all the better.
Unfortunately that's not your job. Why not? It's not because engineers like me are lying to you—it's that we're all too susceptible to lying to ourselves. Perhaps you trust me to triple-check my code, and typically I do. But what are the checks that I perform? The ones I think of?
You're there to advocate for the customer. Not the brain-surgeon customer. Not the overpriced consultant customer. The real customer. The customer who's hoping our software will make his or her workload less unbearable. The customer who's gone out on a limb estimating the time to upgrade. The customer who is neither a software expert nor a domain expert. Yes, the stupid customer. The one who takes instructions too slavishly, and the one who never reads them. The exhausted Sunday 2:30 am customer hoping he'll see his kids before the long weekend is over.
The screw-ups of these customers are testing that we engineers can hardly imagine. We need you to make the dumb mistakes early and often. We need you to tell us "show me"—"make me understand." Please understand I'm getting in trouble with my own kind when I urge this. For you and for me, our product's best quality results from your being insistently ignorant and stupid, distrustful, and demanding to the point of belligerence. Be a b*tch and proud!