The lack of respect and commensurate compensation at a lot of companies doesn't help. QA is often viewed as something requiring less talent and often offshored which layers communication barriers on top of everything. I've met QA people with decent engineering skills that end up having the most knowledge about the application works in practice. Tell them a proposed change and they'll point out how it could go wrong or cause issues from a customer perspective.

This 100%

Companies think QA is shit, so they hire shit QA, and they get shit QA results.

Then they get rid of QA, and then the devs get pissed because now support and dev has turned to QA and customers are wondering how the hell certain bugs got out the door.

Yeah and then we started expecting them to code. Which has not gone well. And the thing is if you have the suspicious mind of a top rate QA person and you can code well, you’re already 2/3 of the way to being a security consultant or a Red Shirt engineer and doubling your salary.

This is why your duty in engineering is to drag QA into every specification conversation as early as possible so that they can display that body of knowledge.

Yes. The best QA people are gold. Infuriating at times, but gold.

> end up having the most knowledge about the application works in practice

The best I've worked with had this quality, and were fearless advocates for the end-user. They kept everyone honest.