They made me a developer

There was a bit of a shake-up here at work. They let go the full-time tester, moved me to development, and made the support guy the QA guy. Which is grand for everyone except my QA protege, and I'm not sure what it says about my testing ability. Granted, I'd been angling for a shot at development all along, and I consider this a move in the right direction. I'll always consider myself a tester, regardless of my job title. At least, I hope so. Testing is intellectually exhilarating when done right, and when intellectually exhilarating testing is asked for by the employer/customer.

My casual post-mortem of the shake-up leads me to the following conclusions:

• Our business model doesn't require as many people dedicated to testing, since our clients generally provide their own QA personnel.
• Our testing is not an on-going thing. It happens on an on-demand, by-request basis. Paying two guys to be full-time testers doesn't make sense in our small company. The utility that is gained just can't justify the costs, not unless management and/or QA find better ways to utilize their time.
• If I hadn't shown some proclivity in programming previously, I would be riding into the sunset alongside my colleague (whom I referred to this job, making that whole affair all the more difficult).

In the end, I can see how it was the right way to go. There will come a time when we will have different QA needs. It will evolve into something similar to what we had. I would love to see QA being done by developers. I mean real QA, not cursory checks and over the wall she goes. But that would require the devs to laterally learn that which they're not super-pumped about. It'll be interesting to see how that goes. Implementing new systems and new initiatives around here is a bit like pulling teeth.