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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

#71

Post by RyanZAG »

Ultimately, even with automated testing, someone has to do the manual testing of checking that it's actually providing the value it's meant to.

When you remove the manual QA team and switch to staged rollout, you are moving the manual QA burden onto your users. You still have that manual QA team - they're the first bunch of users in your staged rollout plan - you just don't pay them anymore and gather their feedback through bug reports. Users are used to buggy software because of other companies who do this (Google, etc) so they carry on being users anyway.

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

#72

Post by loco5niner »

mbesto wrote: post #18
cpncrunch wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is a slightly harsh assessment. They forced the engineers to stop shipping shoddy code, so the QA team wasn't necessary in their opinion. However I think there is probably a middle ground where your engineers deliver quality code and you also have a QA team to increase that quality even further.

> so the QA team wasn't necessary in their opinion. I don't know of any large, complex systems where QA is not necessary. Technology is only fallible because humans are.

Note he didn't say "QA is not necessary". He did say "the QA team wasn't necessary". His statement seems to assume that _someone_ is still doing QA.

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

#73

Post by philk10 »

IanCal wrote: post #69
philk10 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. And having the computer run through 800 checks means a skilled tester can do what they are good at - finding bugs.

This to me was always the point of automating tests. One of the best QA people I knew refused to look at the user stories. He was brilliant at finding things that fit the spec but didn't make sense and things that users might do that weren't specified. He found bugs in the specs, gaps in the specs and just plain untested behaviour. QA is a job that requires skill, benefits greatly from technical understanding and req…

Yup, that's pretty much my job. The devs do great testing and I try and pick holes in what they miss.

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

#74

Post by protomyth »

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…

Did the QA you dealt with not have any automated testing tools? That seems rather foolish to have your QA team manually test every feature every time without an automated smoke test.

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

#75

Post by loco5niner »

minimaxir wrote: post #22

The 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…

emphatic... were you going for empathetic?

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

#76

Post by serge2k »

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…

I think it's important to recognize that neither option is perfect by itself. Manual QA can still be an important process.

That being said, if you have to pick one or the other then you go with automated tests.

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

#77

Post by minimaxir »

loco5niner wrote: post #75
minimaxir wrote: post #22

The 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…

emphatic... were you going for empathetic?

Yes, fixed.

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

#78

Post by whistlerbrk »

I agree in principle for most products, no QA, no testing. Why?

* Everyone should do QA and implement their features own UI/UX, by following the pattern the application and framework sets tuned by an actual designer * An environment where production issues and bugs are prioritized above everything else should be created and fostered * To paraphrase Rich Hickey's analogy on the matter: writing tests is like driving around relying on the guard rails to keep you in the lines. That is (my interpretation): * If your code is this fragile to constantly require testing you've chosen poor abstractions.

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

#79

Post by mixmastamyk »

vox_mollis wrote: post #28
mixmastamyk wrote: post #7

Great. 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…

Places where it is important that the software works.

I once worked on an enterprise product that had a QA team of 25 people.

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

#80

Post by [deleted] »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #7

Great. 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…

[deleted]
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