QA in production

Traditionally, QA roles have focused on assessing the quality of a software product in a pre-production environment. With the rise of Continuous Delivery, the QA role is shifting to include analyzing software product quality in production. This involves monitoring of the production systems, coming up with alert conditions to detect urgent errors, determining ongoing quality issues and figuring out what measurements you can use in the production environment to make this work. While there is a danger that some organizations will go too far and neglect pre-production QA, our experience shows that QA in production is a valuable tool for organizations that have already progressed to a reasonable degree of Continuous Delivery.