I must say I’m increasingly impressed with nowdays evolution of a QA role. Yeah, testers riding on eclipse and cracking on refactoring goodies or other sophisticated java toys (What’s next? bug fixing? =). Nice. How about taking control of deploying release candidates – not only decisions but also running scripts etc. Moreover, QAs are very close to business people doing stuff like: playing prioritization games on bugs / features or confirming expected behavior. It’s almost like superseding the role of business analyst 
QA is a career now and not an interim stage to a developer.
