Find a mirror and repeat: "You are responsible. You are responsible. You are responsible."
The designer, quality assurance person, and tester verify that an application is architected correctly, robust, stable, secure, and scalable, which is a valuable contribution to the project. However, this is short of a warranty for your code. Even if everyone else on the software team does his or her job competently, there is no assurance that the code is correct. Most of what is being verified at the functional level are return values, feature verification, or validation of customer expectations. These roles are not filled by developers, and most likely no one is looking at the code. Your code could pass a unit test and still be broken.
A quality assurance team does not provide a developer with an invitation to write bad code. If so, your bad code is likely to find itself in the release product, much to the dismay of everyone. The quality assurance person or the tester probably does not have a developer background. Even if they wanted, these are not the proper people to review and evaluate individual statements of code for software bugs. They do not have the experience. That remains your responsibility. You would be surprised how much bad code passes quality assurance and testing.
Software problems are also not the fault of the compiler, the operating system, or Microsoft. These could be the origins of the problem, but it is unlikely. Therefore, do not start there when trying to resolve a problem. Consider the problem to be yours. Your problems are easier to fix anyway. Why? You have control of your code base. If the problem is from Microsoft, they must fix it. They will set the timeline and resolution. You have no control in that scenario.
On more than one occasion, I have had this conversation, or something similar, with developers at work.
It starts with a developer walking into my office and announcing, "I have found a bug!"
With some interest, I say, "What kind of bug?"
The developer continues, "It is a bug from Microsoft."
I comment with some skepticism, "Are you sure about that?"
The developer adds, "The bug appears to be..."
"Stop!" I declare. "I will bet a lunch if the problem is actually from Microsoft and not you, the developer."
Of course, they always accept this challenge. The outcome is that I have won several free lunches. I have not lost the wager once. My experience is that the problem is always yours. Would you accept that wager?
