TL;DR: They fired the QA team to save money. Then they made the engineers do the QA work for no extra pay.
Hit the nail on the head. I worked for a company that did this as one of their last efforts to save money. Then that company went away..
Yahoo’s Engineers Move to Coding Without a QA Team
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Re: Yahoo’s Engineers Move to Coding Without a QA Team
#22The stereotype that QA-is-pointless in Silicon Valley is persistent and actually annoying. There will always be issues that even the most comprehensive test suite will miss.
Startups still glorify Facebook's "Move Fast and Break Things" without noting that Facebook has backpedaled from that. After all, people expect startup software to have issues, so what's the harm? Technical debt? Pfft.
Engineers are not the best QA for their own code since they may be adverse to admitting errors in their own code. QA engineers are not as empathetic.
Disclosure: I am a Software QA Engineer in Silicon Valley.
Re: Yahoo’s Engineers Move to Coding Without a QA Team
#23TL;DR: They fired the QA team to save money. Then they made the engineers do the QA work for no extra pay.
It's impossible to ask engineers to do more work in a day - you can only change the work being done and/or the time you give them to do it. My guess is that they'll be asked to do more automated & sanity testing as part of their cycle, and as a result their timelines will be extended.
Imho, this is the way engineering teams should be structured anyways.
Re: Yahoo’s Engineers Move to Coding Without a QA Team
#24The stereotype that QA-is-pointless in Silicon Valley is persistent and actually annoying. There will always be issues that even the most comprehensive test suite will miss. Startups still glorify Facebook's "Move Fast and Break Things" without noting that Facebook has backpedaled from that. After all, people expect startup software to have issues, so what's the harm? Technical debt? Pfft. Engineers are not the best…
The QA function is not pointless.
Whether a distinct QA team is the best means of performing the QA function is, however, a separate question.
Re: Yahoo’s Engineers Move to Coding Without a QA Team
#25They removed only MANUAL QA testing. There is a big difference between removing the QA team entirely and automating QA work.
and of course all manual testing can be automated... good luck with that.
Re: Yahoo’s Engineers Move to Coding Without a QA Team
#26Surprised that people are finding this unusual, in web/mobile anyways. In my experience most engineers do some level of QA themselves, particularly in start-ups < 1000 people. In what ways does an engineer being their own QA negatively impact the company?
Re: Yahoo’s Engineers Move to Coding Without a QA Team
#27Totally buy they could reduce actual errors that matter.
I've worked with many a QA who would get bent up over a detail outside of the spec that didn't really matter, and where all QA testing was manual.
Coders (good ones) are well equipped to automate processes, and to do so quickly, and this extends to integration testing.
Re: Yahoo’s Engineers Move to Coding Without a QA Team
#28Great. I worked for a company that didn't invest in QA, it was consistently a !@#$% mess. When you do this, the need simply shifts to the customer. I wouldn't install our software until the 4th or 5th hotfix patch was available. Certainly, I'm an advocate of a more responsible dev team sharing the quality tasks and continuous integration too. But no QA at all? Hahah... maybe if you're a web portal that no one depends…
I worked for a company that didn't invest in QA
Where are these magical places that do invest in QA? In nearly 20 years of professional development, I've never seen an organization in which the criteria for shipping was anything other than "works for me". I have never seen an organization in which there was either budget or managerial patience for proper QA, let alone anything other than VERY basic acceptance testing.
Re: Yahoo’s Engineers Move to Coding Without a QA Team
#29Surprised to see the negativity here. I have worked in environments with traditional manual QA, and environments where all development is test-driven and nobody is allowed to merge a feature that lacks automated test coverage.
Both the productivity and the quality were higher in the places with fully automated testing. Which is not shocking at all: does anybody really think a human can run through 800 test cases better than a computer can?
It's not a magic way to save money -- the developers obviously end up spending time writing tests. But the long-term value of those tests is cumulative, whereas the effort spent on manual testing is spent anew every release.
Manual review is still good for noticing things that "feel wrong" or for helping think up new corner cases. But those bleed into product owner & design concerns, and aren't really a separate function.
Re: Yahoo’s Engineers Move to Coding Without a QA Team
#30"Some of the engineers really cared about system performance types of things, so they joined related teams. Some started working on automation [for testing], and they thought that was great—that they didn’t have to do the same thing over and over."
There is still QA, it's just automated QA. Welcome to the 21st century.