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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

#31

Post by rifung »

Xyik wrote: post #26

Surprised 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?

Yup me too. At AWS we didn't have test engineers either. Everyone was responsible for testing their own code. We didn't even have SREs, so everyone was also on call.

This just meant that everyone made sure they were writing well tested code before it got released because you didn't want to be the guy who made yourself, or worse, your coworker have to fix something at 3am.

Of course I can see how this could be bad too, like if developers really dislike writing tests. On the other hand, the people who write the code seem best equipped to understand how to set up automated testing most efficiently.

Re: Yahoo’s Engineers Move to Coding Without a QA Team

#32

Post by falsedan »

Xyik wrote: post #26

Surprised 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?

Mostly that you're asking the developers to become experts in software testing and verification, in addition to their existing knowledge. If you have good mentoring & examples & guidelines, then everybody can learn and move along roughly the same path. That takes time and effort to set up, so in those small startups you're likely to see wildly divergent approaches to testing + the friction when people think they should standardize, or when they actually do need to, or when people switch teams.

Re: Yahoo’s Engineers Move to Coding Without a QA Team

#33

Post by reid »

dkopi wrote: post #20

This is actually a story about the triumph of continuous integration and staged rollout. By shipping code constantly, but slowly rolling it out to users - bugs can be detected very quickly by the users themselves, instead of employing large QA teams. Keeping a central code repository, automating builds, frequent commits and automatic tests for code are taking away a lot of load for QA teams.

You are correct! I'm a programmer at Yahoo -- deploying multiple times a day to production, with the confidence your code will work, feels great.

Manual ("batch-release") deployments have been forbidden for over a year, which is a forcing function to change development process to allow deploying to production continuously multiple times a day. This requires robust test and deployment automation and for engineers to better understand what they build. It's pretty nice overall!

Re: Yahoo’s Engineers Move to Coding Without a QA Team

#34

Post by grillvogel »

Xyik wrote: post #26

Surprised 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?

because the person who wrote the code is not the most objective person to review it or find problems with it.

automation doesn't cover everything, you need baseline automation testing as well as more focused manual testing.

Re: Yahoo’s Engineers Move to Coding Without a QA Team

#35

Post by exotherm »

Microsoft made a similar move last year: http://www.windowscentral.com/microsofts-operating-systems-g...

  Foley has heard that some Windows engineers, "primarily dedicated testers" will be let go as part of the layoffs announced today and that product managers and development engineers could take over some of those testing responsibilities.

Re: Yahoo’s Engineers Move to Coding Without a QA Team

#36

Post by steven2012 »

This is pretty much how things go in today's environment, especially in the startups that I've seen. More things are being pushed directly on devs, which is why we earn as high a salary as we do. Traditional QA is pretty much dead, no one should be doing that now if they want to have a career in tech.

Where I work, devs do the QA, and most of the devops work as well. It's the new reality, and anyone who thinks otherwise will be obsoleted.

Re: Yahoo’s Engineers Move to Coding Without a QA Team

#37

Post by arielweisberg »

ef4 wrote: post #29

Surprised 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 bett…

Moving from an environment with a 10:1 dev:qa to 2:1 showed me what happens when dev is not responsible for shipping working software.

No thanks. It's a bunch of deflection and diffusion of responsibility coupled with high latency flakey interactions between different teams. Everything that can slip through the cracks does slip through the cracks.

I'm sure QA can be done well, but I am convinced that giving your devs a pass to not finish their work is a dead end in several dimensions.

Re: Yahoo’s Engineers Move to Coding Without a QA Team

#38

Post by grillvogel »

falsedan wrote: post #32
Xyik wrote: post #26

Surprised 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?

Mostly that you're asking the developers to become experts in software testing and verification, in addition to their existing knowledge. If you have good mentoring & examples & guidelines, then everybody can learn and move along roughly the same path. That takes time and effort to set up, so in those small startups you're likely to see wildly divergent approaches to testing + the friction when people think they shou…

I've spent years as both a tester and a dev. most devs think they are awesome testers because their automated test verified that the happy path works.

Re: Yahoo’s Engineers Move to Coding Without a QA Team

#39

Post by mstade »

I don't think it's that cut and dry. I've worked in some places where the QA team was useless, meaningless red tape to get your stuff deployed. They wouldn't do much but sign off on deployment at some point, yet bore no responsibility if shit hit the fan. In these cases, they really were just an unnecessary cost and you learned pretty quickly to make sure your tests were in place, that you were testing for the right things, and so on.

But then there were the other QA teams. The people that would just reject your stuff outright if it didn't have tests (no matter if it worked) and when the tests passed they would look at things truly from a customer perspective. They would ask really uncomfortable questions, not just to developers, but to designers and business alike. They had a mindset that was different from those creating things; they were the devil's advocate. These people did much, much more good than harm, and they are few and far between. Unfortunately, while I believe they were incredibly valuable, business thought otherwise when cuts came around..

Re: Yahoo’s Engineers Move to Coding Without a QA Team

#40

Post by BinaryIdiot »

Apreche wrote: post #4

TL;DR: They fired the QA team to save money. Then they made the engineers do the QA work for no extra pay.

Did you even read the article? Many of the QA teams were disbanded and did other things like development, test automation, etc.
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