They add latency, there's no way around it. Even if there are no software problems and their verification is instantaneous, QA by itself adds an extra hand-off to a team with an independent task queue.

If your QA team is a "thing" that gets features at the end of a sprint and churns out bugs or releases you're doing it wrong. They should be involved on a feature by feature basis working alongside the developer with QA time incorporated into every task. All unit/integration/system tests should be automated during the cycle so there is no "hand-off to QA". There should be less latency because you have a test expert speeding up implementing tests or being a force multiplier to developers by acting as an internal consultant who can advise on bits where needed.

Seriously, I haven't worked at a company with a QA team in almost 10 years. Do these actually exist anymore? It would certainly be nice to have.

They do! They’re really good at their job but definitely slows down releases.

Then again, the entire point is to release after all the bugs are fixed, not to get all the bugs into production as quickly as possible :)

I guess it depends how you count a release. I think these fast moving teams spend more time in production debugging than the QA team adds. Shipping it should not be the final determination of release time.

I wish more companies valued QA teams, then maybe I wouldn't get so many notices of security breaches and need to keep checks on my credit.

Security breaches are the responsibility of the InfoSec team. The QA team usually won't have the skillset to find security issues.

Or maybe you still would. Are most QA folks actively looking for security issues?

Some of the bonehead stuff will be caught by QA, but there are folks on some QA teams that get security. Sadly, developers talk down about QA so much that the people we need on QA teams are not going to go there.

Not really. QA is functional. We have a product security team doing pentests on new and updated applications.

We have a fantastic QA team, and they test everything that goes to prod. Definitely slows things down (by about 1/3) but our user experience is significantly improved because of it. IMO a good QA/test team is critical to delivering an excellent user experience.

Yes they certainly do, am I am thankful they are part of our team.

On our teams, we are all T shaped, so whoever is low on tickets might temporarily jump into the QA team as well.