In many organizations, people are moved into product assurance teams as a first assignment or after they have demonstrated poor performance at engineering software. Product assurance, however, requires the same level of engineering quality and discipline as designing and coding. As an alternative, rotate the best engineering talent through the product assurance team. A good guideline might be that every excellent engineer spends six months in product assurance organization every two or three years. The expectation of all such engineers is that they will make significant improvements to product assurance during their "visit." Such a policy must clearly state that the job rotation is a reward for excellent performance.
Reference:
Mendis, K., "Personnel Requirements to Make Software Quality Assurance Work," in Handbook of Software Quality Assurance, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1987.
