Testing, Testing and more Testing

Testing, Testing and more Testing should be one of the mantras for success. In general, managers involve during the initial stages but mostly ignore the testing stage. Every manager need to put controls and facilitate using the right processes to ensure that enough testing is done.
All the Managers in the hierarchy should get involved with the testing activity. For example, development managers should review the test scripts and facilitate to ensure the testing is done appropriately. A divisional manager should get involved in reviewing the test plan and reviewing the summary of the test results to ensure that adequate testing is performed.
More often testers are under appreciated and viewed as people who delay the delivery of the system. In reality, testers help the development team to deliver a better quality product. Testers really make the development team look good in front of the customer by providing services to find the bugs (mistakes if we can call) in the systems built. In occasions where the testing was not part of the core processes the module leads scrambled to deliver the product with minimal testing and often worked as Silos with little integration testing. Processes that took into consideration testing at different levels (Unit, Integration, Regression, System etc) had better product delivery and led to reduced costs. (“Bugs found at earlier stages are less costly than the bugs found in later stages”).
Testing activity should be started as early as possible. A test plan could be created during the beginning of the project and test scripts written even before the first line of code is written. An automation of the test scripts could take a long way in performing regression testing easier.
In one occasion, publishing the daily bug report produced by the testing team and made visible to all the employees in the division acted like an incentive to development managers who had fewer bugs. In return this approach has drastically improved the quality of the product.
While it is impossible to develop a system that is bug free, testing activity can take you closer to that goal.
Most importantly, testers need to be appreciated for the services and view them as people who are helping the development to look better.