For the record, when I said QA, I meant QA, in the project management sense of the term. In our environment we don't have a separate testing function, developers test each others code (but never their own). QA should absolutely be independent, to ensure that political expendiency cannot override fundamental quality standards. On a different project I worked on (for a different organisation) without an independent quality function, testing could be (and frequently was) almost entirely dispensed with by management edict in order to meet a deadline. The result was disastrous, except for the project manager who was only judged on meeting the deadline, not the quality of the final deliverables. An independent quality function is there to ensure such ill advised deviations from procedure don't happen.