Scope - Software Quality Assurance and Testing

Question

Following on, and related to (but not duplicate of) this question about migrating questions to SQA: the scope of this site, as defined by the FAQs include, inter alia:

• developer testing
• quality assurance

Given that we now have a standalone Software Quality Assurance and Testing site should we devolve those questions, and (as such) make them Off Topic here.

I appreciate that there is always going to be SOME overlap between the various SE sites, but it does not make logical sense to have a site dedicated to a subject, whilst other sites lay claim to it too.

I propose moving these two items to the and it is not about.. section, with the prompt (ask on SQA instead)

Answer 1

SQA Stack Exchange is a beta site, which means that there's no guarantee it will stay around, and until the site graduates this is a non issue. We do mention one beta site in our FAQ, The Workplace, but for questions that are extremely off topic on Programmers.

If SQA graduates, we'll have to examine whether we want software testing questions on Programmers or not, and more importantly if our software testing questions are being expertly answered here.

In an earlier Meta discussion, How to flag off-topic to migrate to SQA, corsiKa chimed in:

As a moderator of SQA, obviously I have an interest in seeing it grow. But my first priority is to getting problems people face solved. Migrating for the sake of migration or to bolster SQA would both, in my opinion, be bad. I agree with Chris's perspective of "If there's no quality answers coming in, migrate it." I would take it further and say that experienced users who know that questions of that nature have been migrated, then migrate those too. The sooner a question is in a spot where it gets properly answered, the better. But if it's already in that spot, it doesn't need to move.

And I must say I fully agree.

I'd love to see SQA graduate to a full site, but they'll have to make it on their own, I'm not convinced that mentioning them in our FAQ would be a good thing for either site, at least not right now.

Answer 2

Given that at least some kinds of testing questions are legitimately of interest to programmers, I think a blanket policy of migrating test questions to SQA would rob the Programmers site of valuable content. That said, it may make sense to migrate to SQA if there are no productive responses on Programmers.