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Ask HN: Do you have a dedicated QA team?
61–70 of 84 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a dedicated QA team?
#62This seems to be a pretty common setup. I’ve heard opinions on both sides about whether it is a good idea. One of the biggest challenges with it for me is that a dev who is a dev is a very different personality who a dev who manages the entire SDLC. The former placed in the latter environment is going to be lost and annoyed at all the moving parts. They signed up to write code and to trust that the process would deli…
A term I've seen floating around for the latter is a product engineer/developer. This makes the distinction between people who view their jobs as coding to meet requirements vs. solving business problems just happening to use code.
Yep. I actually interviewed for a job like that and that was the title.
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a dedicated QA team?
#63Maintaining test automation is equivalent to maintaining the code base. A dedicated qa team should be doing that as well as manual testing, infra tests, etc.
We had a dedicated qa in a project, and when he was taken away twat automation pretty much died. Nobody maintained it.
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a dedicated QA team?
#64I'm seeing lots of good reasons for keeping a full QA team around, want to add one more: They're basically the only people that know everything about the product. More than product managers who generally specialize in the Foo feature, more than the engineers, certainly more than sales. When a seriously complex support issue comes in, they are always the most valuable people to take a look. To me, the value of QA is more about product knowledge and expertise than just "testing things".
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a dedicated QA team?
#65I've been doing QA my entire couple of years career and I think most companies can do just fine with devs testing their code. My job is just too alienating to be done effectively IMO.
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a dedicated QA team?
#66In an ideal world, devs would always have the time to test their own code. The unit and integration bits aren't the pain point, but once you reach the API or UI, people's knowledge varies widely. That's where a good QE org, either embedded or a mix of centralized and embedded, can be very helpful. In my past companies we've pushed to be champions or domain experts in test automation who's main purpose is to make testing for everyone else suck less. Sure, you will definitely take the brunt of test automation tasks, but some of those tasks should be targeted towards removing impediments for testing.
In one situation I ran into a team who was very frustrated with their automation because it was so slow. After a bit of investigation, I found out they were setting up all of their test data through database migrations, which were 10+ minutes slow. I asked why they weren't using the API to setup test data, to which they replied that none of them had experience with the API. After hacking away it in my spare time for a few weeks, I had a perfectly functional API client, and the tests were converted over time out of using the migrations.
I saw this the other day, and while it might sound cheesy, but someone said that QA to them was "quality acceleration", which actually fits fairly well. I have never worked at a company who had enough testers to go around. Keeping a smaller group of centralized testers to handle the really tough technical challenges, and a larger group of embedded testers who evangelize on testing practices was the most successful approach.
In this case, I wouldn't say you absolutely need a full quality team, but having some folks whose primary focus is testing and test automation to help skill up your dev teams sounds reasonable.
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a dedicated QA team?
#67QA 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…
An old-timer developer at my shop says this:
A developer's job is to make QA's jobs boring. A QA's job is to catch developers making themselves look stupid. As a developer, I'm happy that QA is better at the job than the developers.
Playing this game in a way that all can laugh over lunch is good for the culture as well as the business.
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a dedicated QA team?
#68QA 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…
If QA and developers come from different tracks (eg, devs from CS, QA from problem domain [[ eg. BSc/CS vs BComm/Acct]] ), then QA looks at the things that "weren't in the story requirements" but matter for the product.
If it's a collective "we learned from this", that's good.
If it's seriously and organizationally adversarial, that's bad.
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a dedicated QA team?
#69Devs can add automation tests to a suite just fine. What you lose when you lose dedicated QA is: who improves the automation suite? Who checks out new testing tools and POCs them? Who reads QA blogs and goes to QA conferences and generally considers it their profession to find ways to test more effectively?
This is my take as well. I've worked with various types of QA teams over the years (all in SaaS). Based on my experience, from MOST effective to LEAST effective: 1. QA team works on test harnesses, automation, and works alongside developers to improve how we do testing. This was by far the most effective. 2. No QA team. Developers own every aspect of quality. This worked, but was not as effective as #1. 3. All releas…
A case that also arises is:
- QA is from a problem domain background
- Dev is from a CS/math background
In that case, you can have:
- QA/Dev riff off each other, and collaborate
- The few individuals in the org that have both become the co-ordinators
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a dedicated QA team?
#70We have a dedicated QA team. They work side-by-side with devs, and we rely on them. They are absolute lifesavers and let us focus on the dev side of things. Their knowledge of the products, all the various ways it interacts, and their dedication to testing are wonderful. The quality of the product would suffer if they didn't exist, hands down.
I have heard a dev say that 'QA is my conscience'.