Quality control analyst or artist? What’s the difference?

Lately, I have been wondering if I should change how I refer to my job. In my almost twenty-five years working in software quality control, several words that sound scientific have been added to jobs in my field to describe them: quality control analyst, quality control engineer, or quality control technician. So, just for the fun of it, I was thinking of referring to myself as a quality control artist.

Art and science work together

Don’t get me wrong. I fully recognize the scientific aspects of my job. I spend the requisite time to make sure that alpha characters are not accepted in numeric fields, that 13 is not accepted for a month in a date field, and 32 is not accepted for a day, etc. I make sure that you don’t give the user the impression that he can submit 50 characters into a database field that only holds 30. However, these and other similar but equally obvious tasks are only a small part of what the best practitioners of software quality control work do.

Artists––let’s use painters as an example––work with science. Lines, shapes, and colors all have scientific properties and truths to them. It is the unique application of those scientifically describable elements together that makes what the artist does different from science. And, while we can posit some general principles for how these scientific elements best combine to make a beautiful painting (think proportion, color combination, perspective, and subject matter just to name a few), those guidelines are not the hard and fast rules of scientific pursuits. As the saying goes, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

 

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