Due to many reasons, a wide spread perception about testing has been ‘the blockers to release’,

Not just because of time, IMHO also because the internal goal of testers is somewhat ‘stop the release from going’!

Here how I’ve seen it happen:

– Testers have lots to cover, and less time
– Anything goes wrong in production, tester’s get blamed
– To avoid that situation, testers try to mount substantial evidence that there are risks in the release, so ‘Release at your own risk!’

The main problem here is NOT testers or testing – it’s this blame game mentality

To improve quality in such a setup, start working on build psychological safety first, rest will follow..