The Evolution of Software Teams
From manufacturing floors to cloud platforms: A journey through QA, DevOps, and the roles that build software
Quality assurance didn't start with software—it evolved alongside it
🏛️ Quality Before Software
Before a single line of code was ever written, humans were already obsessed with quality. Ancient craftsmen had apprentice systems to ensure skills were passed down correctly. Medieval guilds established standards for goods. The industrial revolution brought statistical quality control—Walter Shewhart at Bell Labs in the 1920s created control charts that are still used today.
W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran took these ideas to post-war Japan, revolutionizing manufacturing quality. Toyota's production system became legendary. These manufacturing quality principles would later influence software methodologies like Lean and Kanban.
"Quality is everyone's responsibility." — W. Edwards Deming
📅 Timeline: Software Teams Through the Decades
🔄 What is CI/CD?
Continuous Integration (CI) means developers merge code changes frequently, with automated builds and tests running on every commit.
Continuous Delivery (CD) extends this by automating deployment so code can be released to production at any time with confidence.
Tools: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, ArgoCD
🤝 What is DevOps?
DevOps is a culture and set of practices that brings development and operations together. It emphasizes automation, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
Key practices: Infrastructure as Code, monitoring, incident response, blameless postmortems, and shared ownership.
Core principles: CALMS (Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, Sharing)
👥 Modern Software Team Disciplines
Today's software teams are diverse and specialized. Click on any role to learn more about what they do, their history, and how to get started.
🧪 The Evolution of Software Testing
1970s-1980s: Test Phase
Testing was a phase at the end. Dedicated testers executed manual test cases against completed software. Defects were expensive to fix.
1990s-2000s: Test Automation
Record-and-playback tools emerged. QA teams built automation suites. The SDET (Software Development Engineer in Test) role appeared.
2010s: Shift Left
Testing moved earlier in the pipeline. Developers wrote unit tests. TDD and BDD became popular. QA focused on strategy and exploratory testing.
2020s: Quality Engineering
Quality is everyone's job. Testing in production, chaos engineering, observability. AI assists with test generation and maintenance.
"The first bug was a real bug—a moth found in the Harvard Mark II computer in 1947."— Documented by Grace Hopper's team