I deeply wish that more sophisticated automated testing methods like Property-Based Testing were more prevalent among QA teams and organizations.
Asking developers to do QA is broken – why anyone should own QA
111–120 of 193 posts
Re: Asking developers to do QA is broken – why anyone should own QA
#112Asking developers to own QA is broken because developers are naturally biased towards the happy path. If you want to build a bar, you need someone to order -1 beers[1]. Handing off QA to an external team is broken because those people don't have the necessary experience with the product, nor can they quickly and easily engage with development to get to the heart of a problem (and a fix.) Having QA rely exclusively on…
I've also arrived at this approach and don't think it's that uncommon - IMO the article is presenting a false dichotomy. There are still gotchas to look out for in the team-embedded QA approach. In typical team sizes, you often end up with only one QA per team - you need to make sure they have cover (everyone needs a break), and they need support in their discipline (do something to share QA knowledge across teams).
Absolutely. Disappointing to see this sort of shallow sales pitch blogspam making it to the frontpage. I'm surprised more HN readers don't see through this.
The entire purpose of this article is to self-servingly attempt to convince the reader that their product is the only solution to QA problems.
It correctly identifies some challenges with QA, but this solution is certainly not the only way to have effective QA. That Rainforest is resorting to such a disingenuous presentation of solutions to QA issues makes me think they probably don't actually solve QA problems very well.
"We have researched what makes QA successful and X, Y, and Z are what we found. Here's how we believe we're solving Z for our customers" would be a much more honest pitch.
Re: Asking developers to do QA is broken – why anyone should own QA
#113Asking developers to own QA is broken because developers are naturally biased towards the happy path. If you want to build a bar, you need someone to order -1 beers[1]. Handing off QA to an external team is broken because those people don't have the necessary experience with the product, nor can they quickly and easily engage with development to get to the heart of a problem (and a fix.) Having QA rely exclusively on…
i don’t agree with this at all. i’ve seen qa automation team members work solely as a resourcing issue: that if you have X developers you always have X feature developers and never enough people to automate. it’s not that devs aren’t capabale. i fundamentally disagree with rainforests mission that you need “other people” to achieve success in testing. your top engineers have no problem succeeding here
Re: Asking developers to do QA is broken – why anyone should own QA
#114Many years ago I asked a developer which was a bigger deal: - Having an outage - Missing a deadline They answered: "oh having an outage is WAY worse". I then asked: "if that's the case, why do you push so hard to hit your deadlines with code you know and I both know is probably not ready?" They didn't really answer at the time but it eventually dawned on me what's happening: - odds of being yelled at if you miss a de…
sounds like a toxic workplace
Re: Asking developers to do QA is broken – why anyone should own QA
#115I think this article misses two important points on siloed qa teams 1. Qa doesn’t know what can be covered by unit or integration tests 2. Since they treat our code like a black box, they may create permutations of tests which which cover the same functionality Maybe this is part of the draw of having a qa team. Feature coverage rather than code coverage. The downside is this can create a huge number of expensive to…
Yeah, this article is shallow and avoiding the deficiencies inherent to Rainforest's offering. They are defining QA challenges as a nail so they can sell you their hammer.
Re: Asking developers to do QA is broken – why anyone should own QA
#116Looks like a pretty cool product. To play devil's advocate I'd like to poke holes at two things:
Product team caring about quality: Devs need to balance quality with speed, and feel appropriately ashamed when something breaks on prod. To the extent that devs optimise for speed, I don't see why product would be any different. The product team has a large backlog and many important deals blocked by certain features. The incentive to optimise for speed is just as strong. The tension you get between a dedicated QA team and a dev team arises precisely because the QA team cares _only_ about quality. So by moving the responsibility to product you'll either see more corner cutting due to product optimising for speed, or more tension due to product optimising for quality. I don't think you can have your cake and eat it too.
Feasibility of no-code testing: having your browser interact with the page in the way you would like is a good fit for a no-code approach. But most of the effort in writing tests, I've found, is setting up the data (e.g. with factories or fixtures). I'm not so sure that you can no-code that side of QA as easily. If I'm right about that, it means product will end up dependent on devs to write the tests.
Re: Asking developers to do QA is broken – why anyone should own QA
#117Many years ago I asked a developer which was a bigger deal: - Having an outage - Missing a deadline They answered: "oh having an outage is WAY worse". I then asked: "if that's the case, why do you push so hard to hit your deadlines with code you know and I both know is probably not ready?" They didn't really answer at the time but it eventually dawned on me what's happening: - odds of being yelled at if you miss a de…
Were you the manager of the developer you asked? As your role could change the answer.
Re: Asking developers to do QA is broken – why anyone should own QA
#118[deleted]
Re: Asking developers to do QA is broken – why anyone should own QA
#119In my experience what's worked the best is making the team that own the product (or feature or what have you) cross functional and let everyone own everything. Of course everyone brings different skillsets, and of course everyone has falls into their natural domains accordingly, but it really shouldn't be that Bob and Alice have exclusive domain and responsibility over this and Jane over this and John over that. It's…
this has been our experience as well - sadly, however, most (all?) teams specialize and silo as they scale, and so you don't tend to see this setup beyond the very early stage
Re: Asking developers to do QA is broken – why anyone should own QA
#120"Time spent doing QA is time not spent writing code"
I wonder, is the time spent fixing inane production issues time well spent? Is the time spent by testers/QA to report obvious bugs well spent?
Devs, test your stuff like if you were the only one doing QA, and everyone else along the chain should do the same.