Design work is a collaboration between sales/marketing, engineering staff and (where applicable) customer representatives. QA participates by documenting the process and assuring that relevant facts are clearly communicated between these parties. Yeah, and where I worked they'd be in double-letter blueprints and the
Steve Kinney wrote: thing STILL wasn't working. That 'clear communication' turned into vendors screaming at sales engineers for not delivering, QA got circumvented or de-fanged/balled/subverted, and, after throwing QA out the window, they shipped 'whatever worked'. That didn't work really well for disk drives, and it's a hell of a way to create secure crypto. I KNOW the way it works. It doesn't. It's NOT like W. Edward Deming ever intended, and I'm fucking well sure the people who debug Apple's crypto know how it works or else Apple would be a remarketer of other company's designs by now as surely as the hardware company I worked for became a net consumer of other company's hardware re-packaged under their own name, or companies purchased and left, as subdivisions, to do it the right way, under the aegis of their parent. -- RR "Through counter-intelligence it should be possible to pinpoint potential trouble-makers ... And neutralize them, neutralize them, neutralize them"