In fact, QA easily fits into this pattern if they have been considered a separate organization or team. Any situation where you “throw it over the wall” and hope it sticks. In all of these scenarios, there is less ownership by the original developers who put functionality in to worry about the quality of their code. They can excuse this by saying “the other team will let me know if there are any problems” or “the other team will fix whatever small issues there are”.

I bet if a study was done on teams that never had these groups vs. teams that have established these groups that teams that have had to “do it all themselves” have better software integrity, less debt, more time to develop new code and more satisfied end users given all because the “buck stops here” mentality.

Interesting post Chris!