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Want Better Quality? Fire Your QA Team

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Re: Want Better Quality? Fire Your QA Team

#41

Post by lurker19 »

dgabriel wrote: post #4

Considering I work with one of the most incompetent QA engineers I've ever had the displeasure of encountering, I couldn't agree more. This person wastes my time, and the organization's time, and has not actually increased the quality of software (as far as I can tell). It is a waste of a developer's time to decipher a bug that states "it's broken," without clearly defining "broken," or "it," or how to reproduce the…

Do you think that your unpleasant situation is attributable to QA being an unhelpful discipline, or to a particular person performing poorly in their QA role?

Re: Want Better Quality? Fire Your QA Team

#42

Post by zeemonkee »

dgabriel wrote: post #4

Considering I work with one of the most incompetent QA engineers I've ever had the displeasure of encountering, I couldn't agree more. This person wastes my time, and the organization's time, and has not actually increased the quality of software (as far as I can tell). It is a waste of a developer's time to decipher a bug that states "it's broken," without clearly defining "broken," or "it," or how to reproduce the…

So because one QA guy is bad, the whole profession is bad ? You could say that about any profession, including developers.

Re: Want Better Quality? Fire Your QA Team

#43

Post by [deleted] »

bmelton wrote: post #28
DanielRibeiro wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who know how to test are extremely valuable. Specially when doing peer review/pair programming with (solving the blind's eye thing) Testing as a whole is not an easy task as it involves testing some really hard things: memory leaks, performance, UX, correctness of parallel and distributed algorithms/programs/systems. However, Wealthfront engineers probably put this position more into perspective [1]: We do not…

At least in my wife's case, she generally does pre-release QA, and doesn't necessarily do continuous QA. Still though, even if you need support for continuous deployment, you probably want a QA person to set up your automated test cases to test the output of a site in a way that, in my opinion, unit tests don't seem to catch.

[deleted]

Re: Want Better Quality? Fire Your QA Team

#44

Post by arosien »

bmelton wrote: post #28
DanielRibeiro wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who know how to test are extremely valuable. Specially when doing peer review/pair programming with (solving the blind's eye thing) Testing as a whole is not an easy task as it involves testing some really hard things: memory leaks, performance, UX, correctness of parallel and distributed algorithms/programs/systems. However, Wealthfront engineers probably put this position more into perspective [1]: We do not…

At least in my wife's case, she generally does pre-release QA, and doesn't necessarily do continuous QA. Still though, even if you need support for continuous deployment, you probably want a QA person to set up your automated test cases to test the output of a site in a way that, in my opinion, unit tests don't seem to catch.

Having worked in Silicon Valley for 12 years, I have yet to find QA people who could successfully automate testing in a non-fragile way or without using an expensive, proprietary and crappy testing harness. Those who know how to program are invariably better at writing automated tests. One recent CS graduate should be able to put a team of QA out of a job. (Disclosure: I work for Wealthfront)

Re: Want Better Quality? Fire Your QA Team

#45

Post by arosien »

kenjackson wrote: post #7

QA and dev are two different skills. It's like saying that we save on design by having the devs do it, or having your quarterback also play noseguard. Sure it works in high school, but not when you're a pro. I'd much rather hire someone who knows testing and QA well and let my devs focus on writing bug-free product code.

I disagree. Developers who don't know how to test are bad developers, they should go. And conversely, if you have QA, they should know how to develop, otherwise you're paying them to hunt, peck, and click. Why not have QA write the code to have computer do that and save like 1000x the time? That's efficiency AND quality.

Re: Want Better Quality? Fire Your QA Team

#46

Post by kenjackson »

arosien wrote: post #45
kenjackson wrote: post #7

QA and dev are two different skills. It's like saying that we save on design by having the devs do it, or having your quarterback also play noseguard. Sure it works in high school, but not when you're a pro. I'd much rather hire someone who knows testing and QA well and let my devs focus on writing bug-free product code.

I disagree. Developers who don't know how to test are bad developers, they should go. And conversely, if you have QA, they should know how to develop, otherwise you're paying them to hunt, peck, and click. Why not have QA write the code to have computer do that and save like 1000x the time? That's efficiency AND quality.

Of course QA knows how to program. But their skillset is about breaking code. It's about writing this crazy C++ function that shows how your API has a security bug in this case. As developers their like dev tools developers as their customers are generally devs.

Skillset maybe isn't the right word... mindset maybe better word. Both should be good programmers -- in fact you'll often have more test code than product code. But you likely won't be able to switch your dev team to QA and vice-versa and get the same results.

Re: Want Better Quality? Fire Your QA Team

#47

Post by arosien »

kenjackson wrote: post #46
arosien wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Developers who don't know how to test are bad developers, they should go. And conversely, if you have QA, they should know how to develop, otherwise you're paying them to hunt, peck, and click. Why not have QA write the code to have computer do that and save like 1000x the time? That's efficiency AND quality.

Of course QA knows how to program. But their skillset is about breaking code. It's about writing this crazy C++ function that shows how your API has a security bug in this case. As developers their like dev tools developers as their customers are generally devs. Skillset maybe isn't the right word... mindset maybe better word. Both should be good programmers -- in fact you'll often have more test code than product co…

You're lucky to have QA people who know C++, I've never met one. Maybe I've been in too many web-oriented startups.

Re: Want Better Quality? Fire Your QA Team

#48

Post by dgabriel »

zeemonkee wrote: post #42
dgabriel wrote: post #4

Considering I work with one of the most incompetent QA engineers I've ever had the displeasure of encountering, I couldn't agree more. This person wastes my time, and the organization's time, and has not actually increased the quality of software (as far as I can tell). It is a waste of a developer's time to decipher a bug that states "it's broken," without clearly defining "broken," or "it," or how to reproduce the…

So because one QA guy is bad, the whole profession is bad ? You could say that about any profession, including developers.

Bad QA is worse than no QA. In my 15 year career, I've seen two decent QA analysts, and they both had extensive technical backgrounds.
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