Ask HN: Do you have a dedicated QA team? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Do you have a dedicated QA team?

#31

Post by utkarshdix02 » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 5:15 PM UTC

Problem I faced in past with a dedicated QA team is, the development process is often faster than QA. Which puts QA in the backseat with each new release. Also, human coordination becomes a problem as there will be a small configuration of which QAs team might not be aware of e.g. A/B configurations, hotfixes, etc.

On the other hand, with devs writing tests is there is learning curve and most devs have not written tests or think of it as a chore. They also don't have end-user perspectives and have biases towards things working.

Ideally in my opinion testing should be shared responsibility, where devs test feature they implemented and the QA team add checks from an end-user perspective.

P.S.- I'm co-founder of startup https://crusher.dev making QA easy by using a low-code approach.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have a dedicated QA team?

#32

Post by ivan_gammel » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 5:16 PM UTC

etblg wrote: post #5

We didn't use to, but now we do. I think we did a better job when we didn't have the team TBH. Engineers here used to be the ones testing out the code, verifying their changes on pre-production environments, and keep an eye on the deployed code in production to make sure it's working well. Now I get a sense that engineers do the work up to the point of where QA steps in, and throwing it over to them and moving on. Th…

> the QA team not going out of their way to test things the engineers didn't explicitly say to test

This is the exact reason why QA team should have sufficient autonomy to design test cases on their own. If QA team is dev-driven, they will hardly bring any value, but they surely bring a lot of overhead.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have a dedicated QA team?

#33

Post by larrik » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 5:18 PM UTC

In my experience, devs make terrible QAs, since they know what the code should do and never think of things like "pasting a novel into a textfield" and the like. They also tend to be much more expensive as well. Combine the two, and it's just not at all an efficient use of a company's budget.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have a dedicated QA team?

#34

Post by yahn00 » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 5:30 PM UTC

As apps become easier to maintain and keep online, the extreme separation in roles is only important at companies with sufficient scale in some metric to need the specialization.

I can deploy a prod EKS/CI/CD setup with Terraform scripts, and be deploying code to the public in a morning now.

Like other service jobs, IT is going to contract sooner than later. NoCode infrastructure is where k8s was in 2014.

IT workers thinking in IT patterns as usual is a huge blocker to progress. Elder workers domain knowledge is stored in DBs and source control everywhere. It’s trivial to parse and transform into another syntax.

Congrats; you trained your Copilot replacements without even knowing it.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have a dedicated QA team?

#35

Post by dreadlordbone » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 5:32 PM UTC

utkarshdix02 wrote: post #31

Problem I faced in past with a dedicated QA team is, the development process is often faster than QA. Which puts QA in the backseat with each new release. Also, human coordination becomes a problem as there will be a small configuration of which QAs team might not be aware of e.g. A/B configurations, hotfixes, etc. On the other hand, with devs writing tests is there is learning curve and most devs have not written te…

Your product looks great but your website has a decent amount of grammatical errors, which I think might scare off potential customers.

I recommend having an English first person proof read through your site.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have a dedicated QA team?

#36

Post by honey-badger » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 5:35 PM UTC

QA Engineer here. We don't have a centralized QA department, but we do have a dedicated engineer who is responsible for QA that is integrated within the development team.

Before I joined my team, it didn't have a dedicated QA member. The quality of the software was fine, but there were other compromises. The team didn't have a good test strategy - every developer made adhoc decisions on how their code was tested. Our E2E tests ran slowly and had tonnes of duplicates, since nobody had gone through the entire list and cleaned it up. A dedicated QA member has the time and the responsibility to solve problems with quality that most devs are likely to treat as secondary to developing features. And the improvements are substantial - our E2E tests now run 18x (!) faster.

For the most part, I see my role as being an enabler - I help devs build quality into their work and hold them accountable to it. I don't see it as an adverserial division of responsibility, but more as a collaborative effort, with the dev and QA coming from a different focal point.

The problem with strict division of labour and adverserial QA is that it leads to

1) Organizational / team silos

2) Local optimization (software development and QA is intricately interwoven, so it doesn't lend itself well to this strict division)

3) Information overhead and loss

A good QA engineer, IMO, requires better coordination and communication skills than a developer because they liaise with multiple developers and inspire them to make quality a priority in their work. Further, QA is involved from the definition of a feature (in sprint refinements) right up to when code is deployed and runs well in production. Therefore, at certain points, the boundaries between QA and the Dev team or QA and the PO blur and disappear entirely.

I found this to be a great read that summarizes my thoughts on the topic: https://www.thoughtworks.com/en-de/insights/blog/qa-dead

Re: Ask HN: Do you have a dedicated QA team?

#37

Post by twblalock » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 5:36 PM UTC

At this point I only see value in manual QA testing for front-end apps.

It's now possible to test pretty much anything via automation, although front-end testing is still harder than most and there are some intangible UX issues that can only be experienced by human users.

But for testing APIs? It is normally possible to cover 100% of what is needed via a combination of unit tests and integration tests. This is especially true now that tooling exists that can bring up ephemeral test environments with dependencies such as databases etc.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have a dedicated QA team?

#38

Post by utkarshdix02 » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 5:37 PM UTC

dreadlordbone wrote: post #35

utkarshdix02 wrote: post #31

Problem I faced in past with a dedicated QA team is, the development process is often faster than QA. Which puts QA in the backseat with each new release. Also, human coordination becomes a problem as there will be a small configuration of which QAs team might not be aware of e.g. A/B configurations, hotfixes, etc. On the other hand, with devs writing tests is there is learning curve and most devs have not written te…

Your product looks great but your website has a decent amount of grammatical errors, which I think might scare off potential customers. I recommend having an English first person proof read through your site.

Thanks for the feedback. We built it a while ago and never iterated over it. We will update it soon.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have a dedicated QA team?

#39

Post by Clubber » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 5:37 PM UTC

justin_oaks wrote: post #24

QA teams primary benefit shouldn't be running automated tests that the developers could do. It should be to do exploratory testing and trying to break things. There should be a adversarial, yet respectful, relationship between dev and QA where dev tries to get their software released and QA is finding reasons why it shouldn't be released. If there's only developers who test their own code then they're not incentivize…

>It seems odd to me when those in charge ignore the problems of disbanding QA. But I assume it's because the management may not be incentivized to promote quality software. Instead the incentives are to crank out features.

>That said, maybe the market for the software doesn't punish the software makers for having buggy software. In such a case, ignoring QA work is a rational decision.

I think there are a lot of things that promote cost cutting in software quality:

  1. Consolidation: There's usually 1 big player that everyone uses. When that's the case there is nowhere else to go.

  2. Lock in: Even if there was somewhere to go, once you've committed your business to a software vendor, it's really hard (time + expense) to switch.

  3. Executives get bonuses based on income: The easiest way to juice the numbers is to cut employees and departments. The results of cutting QA won't get noticed by the market for a few years.

  4. Over reliance on automated unit testing by management: I think unit testing is great, but it's really hard to utilize it on user XP. It was never meant to be a replacement to manual QA testing, but an augmentation. Of course refer to #3.

  5. Reduction in autonomous middle management: Executives say cut this and cut that, middle management who actually know the process have little to no say, or won't say because they don't want to lose their jobs.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have a dedicated QA team?

#40

Post by aeturnum » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 5:38 PM UTC

To me the benefit of a QA team comes from synthesis. If you are providing one service to a few groups you don't get that much out of having a dedicated team. However, once you start having different people using your product in different ways it helps enormously to have a teams whose job is to be familiar with customer pain points and setups and warn you that your change is going to trigger problems.