"Let's have a Trial" - QA Engineer PrepayPower Employee Review

We were brought into a meeting by the CTO in April that the company had decided to do a new "trial way of working" for the dev team and if successful then it would mean the QA team would have to have it's team sized reduced. Apparently this decision had been made in February but we were only told in April. This resulted in the QA team not being allowed to test anything and also meant that everything was instantly being pushed to production without the green light from QA. Major red flag. When asked why they decided to do this trial we were told that a board member of PrepayPower was also on the board of Ryanair and he suggested we their way of working. This sounded absolutely ridiculous. but we had no say in the matter. The QA team were left totally in the dark when it came to this "trial", from not being told how it was going to not being told when it was going to end. This resulted in the QA team now internally "gatekeeping" product knowledge from each other which is never a good move. The reason for this is that they felt as if they were protecting their position within the company. Overall I was very disappointed in the lack of transparency from all of this. It led to unneeded stress and anxiety.