The irony is that we all independently decided QA was a “process smell” around the same time. The logic seemed airtight: developers should own quality, shift left, test in prod with feature flags, move fast. Every tech blog and conference talk said the same thing. What nobody mentioned is that QA teams weren’t just finding bugs—they were the institutional memory of how things break.
When you dissolve QA and tell developers “you own quality now,” that knowledge just evaporates. Each developer tests the happy path for their feature and calls it done. The edge cases? The interaction effects? The weird state machines? Those all ship to prod. The really insidious part is the metrics looked great. Velocity up, deployment frequency up, cycle time down. We were measuring output, not outcomes. Exec dashboards showed green across the board while user experience quietly degraded.
Now we’re in the equilibrium state: software ships fast and breaks often, every deploy is a dice roll, and we’ve normalized “hotfix Friday” as just how things work. The velocity gains were real, but we were measuring distance traveled, not value delivered. Turns out “everyone owns quality” means nobody owns quality. Who knew.