Somewhere along the way, IT lost the most essential part of building software: requirements.

Because why define what we want to build, when we can:

  • start coding,
  • test it later,
  • and finally toss in someone who pretends to know what it was supposed to do.

Code without requirements is like unsalted rice porridge – soft, shapeless, and utterly tasteless. But that doesn’t stop anyone from announcing a successful sprint review.

The project must go live. Deadlines are set. There’s a plan. Content? We’ll figure it out as we go.

We enter a sick parody of TDD:

  • RED: we have no requirements

  • GREEN: tests pass because we don’t know what they’re testing

  • REFACTOR: BA parachuted in six months late to draw the flow while the scope mutates live

And me? I sit in QA, tempted to shout across the Teams channel:

Is there still a Product Owner on board?Because it looks like they took off to the Moon with the real backlog.

This isn’t Agile. It’s not even Kaizen-adjacent. It’s a theater of metrics, commits, and faux agility, where:

  • instead of quality, we have speed,
  • instead of a backlog, we have dev chat logs,
  • and instead of purpose, we have pretty dashboards and test coverage charts.

And QA is told to test…

Not features. Not business logic. But gold-plated crap.

Shiny on the outside, because:

  • 90% coverage
  • all tickets marked “done”
  • dashboards flashing green

But inside? Duplicate data, tangled logic, hardcoded dependencies, no rollback, flaky CI.

Still demo-ready, so… We turned lead into gold.

QA knows it doesn’t work. Dev knows it doesn’t work. BA probably suspects it, but no one asks.

And the PO? Gone.

Not in this sprint’s scope.

What next? We keep going. We layer on more gold. We build CI pipelines for tests that check nothing. We run daily standups where nobody says anything. We do scope planning after release.

And when it breaks?
It’s QA. Always QA.

Because obviously, someone should have seen it.
Because obviously, someone should have said something.
Because obviously, someone tested it.

That someone is QA. The last alchemist in a world where gold is just a dashboard filter.