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Maybe getting rid of your QA team was bad

davidkcaudill.medium.com

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Re: Maybe getting rid of your QA team was bad

#191

Post by mb7733 »

JohnFen wrote: post #175
Shaanie wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a problem with Scrum, it's a problem with your team. If you're doing a bug bash every sprint, then your velocity is already including the time spent on bug bashes. If it's not in every sprint, you can reduce the forecast for sprints where you do them to account for it (similar to what you do when someone is off etc). If you're competing within the team to complete as many story points as possible that's pr…

> Is someone using story points as a metric of anything other than forecasting? Very nearly every company I've worked at that uses Scrum uses story points, velocity, etc., as a means of measuring how good you or your team are. Forecasting is a secondary purpose.

Don't teams assign points to their own tickets? So how could one compare the points between teams?

Re: Maybe getting rid of your QA team was bad

#192

Post by hintymad »

Maybe it's hard to find enough technically strong engineers with a passion on testing. Microsoft used to advocate how technically challenging to be a SDET - software engineer in test. IBM used to tell its test teams that testing engineers know the big picture, understand the products, and have to do awesome technical work. Unfortunately in reality, more engineers are more willing to directly develop products than becoming an expert in test.

Re: Maybe getting rid of your QA team was bad

#193

Post by tstrimple »

hj3939393d wrote: post #183
tstrimple wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose behind all those things you were pursuing (apart from accessibility) should have been to increase the rate at which the team is able to ship features. If your work on these items over the course of a year haven't demonstrably improved delivery speed, then what value did they actually bring? If they have improved delivery speed and you can show evidence for that, why would you be nervous going into a revie…

> demonstrably improved delivery speed Thinking this can be reduced to a single metric is the blight of modern software (and business in general, I think). Mapping an individual change to improved delivery speed is in the vast majority of cases an impossible task and any decent developer knows this. It's management+ that wants simple easy metrics since they lack the deep understanding required to do their job well. S…

If you can’t prove your contributions are worthwhile, you’re not going to get recognition. People putting out fires get recognition because they are solving visible and urgent problems. If your work reduces the chances of those fires, it should be measurable otherwise what is the point? Do you honestly believe someone who has spent a year “improving processes” but cannot measure the impact of that year of work deserves glowing praise?

And it’s not that managers don’t understand developers and the work they do. It’s that a lot of developers don’t engage at all with what a business actually does. They are working at IKEA while trying to convince management to use the nice dovetail joints instead of that garbage dowel based assembly. Not only do dovetails look better, they are substantially stronger! All very true statements from a craftsman woodworker. But a complete failure to understand the business and how and why it operates as it does and the value they are expected to provide within it.

Re: Maybe getting rid of your QA team was bad

#194

Post by tstrimple »

ponector wrote: post #158
tstrimple wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is one reason DevOps teams don't make sense. DevOps is a skill developers need to have. It needs to be embedded within the development team, not some other team's responsibility who only focuses on "DevOps" work. You create the build and deployment pipelines and move on to other project work. If you give someone a role and say their job is to do "DevOps" they will HAVE to invent things to do because that's such…

It is not about DevOps. In every organization if you do your work good and have no fuckups - you will not be recognized and promoted. But if you are hero-firefighter - managers will love you and help with promotion. Because visibility is a key! Key to everything in the corporate life. If your work is not visible for managers - you are doing nothing.

Of course visibility is key. What other kind of option is there?

> “We have no idea what you did this year and no one has any idea of the value you’re providing, but what the hell. Here’s a huge bonus!”

That doesn’t seem a little insane to you?

Re: Maybe getting rid of your QA team was bad

#195

Post by JohnMakin »

ponector wrote: post #158
tstrimple wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is one reason DevOps teams don't make sense. DevOps is a skill developers need to have. It needs to be embedded within the development team, not some other team's responsibility who only focuses on "DevOps" work. You create the build and deployment pipelines and move on to other project work. If you give someone a role and say their job is to do "DevOps" they will HAVE to invent things to do because that's such…

It is not about DevOps. In every organization if you do your work good and have no fuckups - you will not be recognized and promoted. But if you are hero-firefighter - managers will love you and help with promotion. Because visibility is a key! Key to everything in the corporate life. If your work is not visible for managers - you are doing nothing.

The fortunate thing is there are measurable metrics you can hit and improve upon as an X-Ops team, but implementing those takes buyin from the org or enough freedom to go rogue and do it on your own.

Re: Maybe getting rid of your QA team was bad

#196

Post by NegativeK »

krisoft wrote: post #172
pjsg wrote: post #103

At the start of my career (late 70s), I worked at IBM (Hursley Park) in Product Assurance (their version of QA). We wrote code and built hardware to test the product that was our area of responsibility (it was a word processing system). We wrote test cases that our code would drive against the system under test. Any issues we would describe in general terms to the development team -- we didn't want them to figure out…

> I've been in these test session where we have generated 100 bug tickets in an hour. Is that like… usefull to anyone? Especially if they are duplicates. It feels to me that 10 different bugs is enough to demonstrate that the feature is really bad, after that you are just kinda bouncing the rubble?

It's "free" QA. And presumably you'll do it again later until it's better.

Re: Maybe getting rid of your QA team was bad

#198

Post by NegativeK »

ponector wrote: post #138
mikestew wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not because “QA had the final say”, it’s because your QA team were ass clowns. Any QA team that discourages dev from writing or running tests needs to be burnt to ground and rebuilt.

Unless dev is switching to write test 100% of time and become a tester it is highly not recommended to let developers write tests. That QA was not a clown, they've seen some shit... Would you let QA to write features in your production code?

I spent a long time in QA.

Devs that don't test their own code are usually wasting the QA team's time with garbage. It also tends to cultivate (or is a symptom of) an environment where groups are throwing projects over the wall, so to speak, without tightly integrating QA into the process. This wastes significant amounts of time.

Re: Maybe getting rid of your QA team was bad

#199

Post by NegativeK »

amlozano wrote: post #21

This point is brought up in the article but I think it is at the real heart of the issue. QA is almost always seen as a 'cost center' by the business and upper management. I have a hypothesis that you never ought to work in a department that is seen as a 'cost center'. The bonuses, the recognition, and the respect always goes to the money makers. The cost center is the first place to get more work with less hands, ge…

I've worked in cost center groups almost all my life, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

I'm fine with bonuses, etc going to other groups. I'm paid well as a tech worker, and many of those jobs would make absolutely miserable -- assuming I turned out to actually be good at them.

Re: Maybe getting rid of your QA team was bad

#200

Post by bradleyjg »

amtamt wrote: post #54

> The most conscientious employees in your organization are the most bitter. They see the quality issues, they often address them, and they get no recognition for doing so. When they speak up about quality concerns, they get treated like mouthbreathers who want to slow down. They watch the “move fast and break things” crowd get rewarded time after time, while they run around angrily cleaning up their messes. To these…

DBAs and Infra, are in the same boat as QAs. Pendulam will swing back in not so long time frame i hope.

Ultimately it’s up to the customers. Will they walk because of bugs and outages or stay because of shiny new features?

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