Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Yahoo’s Engineers Move to Coding Without a QA Team

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–188 of 188 posts

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

#181

Post by bboreham »

csours wrote: post #119
mstade wrote: post #39

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…

When testing, you are the headlights of the project. ... Testing is done to find information. Critical decisions about the project or the product are made on the basis of that information." [1] I recently became a software tester, and I really didn't understand the role for quite a while. Is my primary responsibility finding bugs? Logging defects? Analysing requirements documents? Writing test scripts? Writing Status…

The goal of a QA person should be "shipping great software".

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

#182

Post by csours »

bboreham wrote: post #181
csours wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When testing, you are the headlights of the project. ... Testing is done to find information. Critical decisions about the project or the product are made on the basis of that information." [1] I recently became a software tester, and I really didn't understand the role for quite a while. Is my primary responsibility finding bugs? Logging defects? Analysing requirements documents? Writing test scripts? Writing Status…

The goal of a QA person should be "shipping great software".

I agree that's the goal, but what is the role? What are the contributions that QA provide? That's what I had problems understanding.

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

#183

Post by loren_dunlop »

i'm in QA - have been for 12 years. Testers who can only perform manual testing, and organisations that only test manually are the product of companies realising they should 'do some qa', and managers who do not understand SW development signing off to build large, manual only test teams.

It's inefficient, there is a very slow rate of feedback to devs, not much can be done until there is a working UI - so it all lends itself to the broken waterfall model of code code code, then 'do some testing' right at the end of the project - which has already seen overruns from dev squeeze qa time out.

Manual QA testers are relatively cheap on paper - so managers don't see a problem with building a team this way.

I'm not sure this will ever go away, but as someone who tries to learn every year, and master his career, I welcome Yahoo's choice. I see a role for a highly skilled 'developer in test' role superseding the traditional, ineffective manual QA role. Someone who can build automation frameworks quickly, be responsible for maintaining them and test data, and provide rapid feedback to devs. Devs should still be carrying out unit testing, code reviews etc, but I do believe a role still exists for someone to focus on QA, just with a lot more skills, providing far more rapid feedback, with less dependencies on the devs for test environments.

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

#184

Post by grandalf »

philk10 wrote: post #172
grandalf wrote: post #5

Yahoo's main issue is UX and usability, not software quality, so this sounds like another way of saying Yahoo laid off its QA team.

Depends on your definition of 'quality' - if s/w isn't usable and has bad UC then how can it be high quality?

True. It has to work as intended too.

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

#185

Post by silverbax88 »

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…

This is what a great QA tester will do. Good devs don't ship code with known bugs - but they will miss things because they code to the feature/user story/known behavior. That's what their job is. A good QA person's job will be to spend a whole lot of time thinking about how to break the dev's app that the dev missed.

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

#186

Post by pc86 »

serge2k wrote: post #84
pc86 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The arguments here such as "oh they just make the devs do it and don't pay them anymore" are ridiculous. Nobody's working 80 hour weeks doing two full-time jobs at once.

I still firmly believe this is a large part of the reason for having devs carry pagers. Maybe in better companies than I worked it that isn't the case, but devs shouldn't be your 24/7 support staff.

Isn't pager duty baked into the salary of the position? I thought that jobs where you're expected to be on call to some extent (hopefully at level 3 or 4 of support?) have an artificially high salary compared to those where it's a 9-5 gig?

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

#187

Post by jboy55 »

jrumbut wrote: post #142
jboy55 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incentives often cause really nasty political wars within orgs. When a site gives a 500 because a database went down and the web app couldn't connect to it... is that a bug, a missed test case or should ops take a hit on down time? Furthermore, if you argue that the dev team should have reasonable failsafes in code to connect to a db, in a 10 year old organization, should the current Dev team pay for something that c…

You're absolutely right, assuming we're talking about business/consumer apps and not pacemakers or rocket ships. An incentive/penalty system for bugs without an incentive/penalty system for features completed leads to paralysis. And a complicated incentive system leads to game playing over productivity. It's an old saying: be careful what you measure because you'll get a lot more of it.

I'm beginning to think that the best incentive system is just a good base pay, with an emphasis on personal learning and growth. Have engineers strive to become better engineers by taking courses, attending meetings and publishing content. Quality will fall out of that as a positive side-effect.

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

#188

Post by nikdaheratik »

diivio wrote: post #148

This isn't surprising. Microsoft switched to this model a few months after Satya took over. For the majority of Microsoft teams it worked really well and showed the kinds of results mentioned in this yahoo article. Look at many of our iOS apps as an example. But for some parts of the Windows OS team apparently it didn't work well (according to anonymous reports leaked online to major news outlets by some Windows team…

I don't believe it's 100% on the dev to find all of the problems. Once you get a look at how the code works, you are less likely to find unhappy cases simply because you know in advance that doing X is stupid so you don't think of it. But of course a user wouldn't know that it's stupid or they are lazy or not as careful as they could be.

That's why you need a second person (ideally QA) to look at the result and test it. Cognitive bias 101.

Post reply on HN