The Courage of Making Ourselves Redundant

It’s quite common to find QA teams still sitting at the end of the delivery line, validating work before it reaches production. Not because they want to be blockers. Many of them genuinely wish things worked differently. They talk about shared ownership, testing earlier, continuous delivery. But then they sigh and say something like, “in an ideal world, yes, but for now developers just aren’t ready to work without us.”

Ah, the usual “ideal world.”

The tricky part is that it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle: the more people cling to their role, the more they slow down transformation. Note that this applies to developers too: the more they define themselves solely as coders, the more they inadvertently nurture a culture of unnecessary quality checks (“it’s someone else’s job!”).

The belief that developers cannot function without final testers is more widespread than we often admit. It is rarely about control or pride. It is about survival. For many people in QA, their role is what puts bread on the table. Helping a team reach a point where they no longer need an end-of-line validation team can feel like helping to erase their own job. That is a hard thing to do, both emotionally and practically.

Yet holding onto that position quietly works against the culture most QA professionals wish to build. Keeping validation as a separate step means quality never fully becomes a shared responsibility. It stays a phase, not a habit. It keeps developers from maturing and QA specialists from evolving into the enabling role that would truly raise the bar for everyone.

If we really want high-performing teams, the goal cannot be to protect a QA stage. It has to be to make it unnecessary. That is how we spread a quality culture instead of bottling it up.

But here is the sobering truth: human cultures rarely change easily when the changes threaten the method people use to survive. As Upton Sinclair wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

So how do we change so that people don’t feel threatened? And how do we carry them safely to a new, ideal world?

Originally linked on LinkedIn.