Whether or not QA is a value add in lean?

Often times in lean, what is considered the value to customers is the code which gets delivered to customer. So when we are talking of increasing value delivered by development process to customer, it also means that the code which gets delivered to customer and gets used has increased. In other words, the throughput of the system has increased. The quality folks are often left with learning to code and to automate. In terms of increasing the skill set of quality folks, i beleive this is a step in right direction. However, what also saddens me is that the specialization which pure quality folks bring on to table goes missing. There is a lot which the quality community has to do by working together to findout the right path for the quality engineers and in inculcating the right definition of quality engineering skillsets at the right time.