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We actually just moved a couple of our QA people into our SRE/Infra team, they work on our testing automation system 🙂

That was my experience! Though it seems more rare than I would have hoped 🤷‍♀️

From what I have observed in platform teams that I worked with, this is actually pretty rare. Only later down the road, when “platform as a product” is actually really established, or there have been outages (stop-the-world moment for all devs) that demonstrate how such a platform is “critical infrastructure”, QA becomes a thing and people coming from that background are considered for the platform team. My best guess on the reason for that is that IDPs are for developers and most developers cultivate a dislike for QA - making platform owners of not well-established platforms think that having QA personas might be a communication nightmare. I am personally thinking the opposite - someone that brings the QA perspective to the platform team is invaluable.

Hi Abby, good, bad, indifferent? I think you have already given the answer yourself when describing the skill/knowledge sharing experience that you had 🙂. A platform works as any other software product: it is supposed to deliver value to your colleagues/customers. It does that by adhering to certain quality expectations, either functional or non-functional. Adding QA experienced staff ("Let's put the customer goggles on!") to crossfunctional platform teams will increase the likelihood of meeting those quality expectations. Period.