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Should QA exist?

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Re: Should QA exist?

#11

Post by Ekaros »

darkerside wrote: post #6
andrewstuart wrote: post #5

Hard to believe people are asking this question in 2026. Quality is something that takes dedicated focus and lots of work. Therefore it’s a job, not an afterthought or latest priority for someone whose primary focus is not quality.

So why would you outsource it to another team that isn't doing the actual work?

Team doing the work should do QA so they only produce quality.

But on other hand those people can not often be trusted. As such you need a team that does checks again. Or alternatively they might have misunderstood something and thus produced incorrect system. Or there is some other fault in their thought process or reality. And system operates differently in more real scenario.

Re: Should QA exist?

#12

Post by weinzierl »

sz4kerto wrote: post #4

"Before I weigh in further, I’d like to make sure you’re familiar with the testing pyramid." The testing pyramid is a par excellance SWE kool-aid. Someone wrote a logically-sounding blogpost about it many years ago and then people started regurgitating it without any empirical evidence behind it. Many of us have realised that you need a "testing hourglass", not a "testing pyramid". Unit tests are universally consider…

The testing pyramid comes from a time of desktop apps with no API and when UI tests were extremely expensive. I made 100% sense in that context, it never did in other contexts. Despite its omnipresence it had not made any sense for the vast majority of us in the past 25 years.

Re: Should QA exist?

#13

Post by Juliate »

If you care about: the consistency of your output, what you're selling to your customers, you have not much of a choice (than to control what you are shipping).

Not even mentioning the potential regulatory/market and legal consequences if you don't.

Re: Should QA exist?

#14

Post by thanksgiving »

Of course, anyone would agree that if wishes were fishes, QAs should not exist. We would all use agile with cross-functional teams. Every single team member can do any work that may be needed. All team members can take time off any time they need to because we have full coverage and the world is a beautiful place.

Of course, none of this is true in the real world.

For example, just last week we had a QA essentially bring down our web application on staging environment always reproducible with a sequence of four clicks. Follow the sequence with about the proper timing and boom, exception.

Should this have been caught before a single line of code was written? Yes, it should have been caught before any code was written. However, the reality is that it did not. Should this have been caught by some unit test? Integration test? End to end test? Code review? I'd argue as we barrel down a world of AI slop, we need to slow down more. We need QA more than ever.

Re: Should QA exist?

#15

Post by ottoflux »

100% and I’m a software developer and have been for ~30 years. Good QA people know how to find regression and bugs _that you didn’t think about_ which is the whole reason why it shouldn’t be under “engineering” and that it should exist. One of the QA people I work with currently is one of my favorite people. They don’t always make me happy (in the moment) with their bugs or with how they decide to break the software, but in the end it makes a better, more resilient product.

Re: Should QA exist?

#16

Post by 0x696C6961 »

liampulles wrote: post #8

I work with someone who does great QA work. They know how to rip something apart, they understand the user's non-technical perspective and approach, and they understand what edge cases to look out and they have the actual equipment to test on different physical devices (and so on). Most importantly, they have the diligence and patience to methodically test subtly different cases, which I frankly don't have. On the qu…

If all/most QA people were like this then no one would be complaining.

Re: Should QA exist?

#17

Post by baal80spam »

donatj wrote: post #7

Yes. Without a doubt. I worked with a QA team for the last fifteen years until last year when they laid them all off. QA is a discrete skill in and of itself. I have never met a dev truly qualified to do QA. If you don't think this you have never worked with a good QA person. A good QA persons super power is finding weird broken interactions between features and layers where they meet. Things you would never think of…

> "what if I did X in one tab, Y in another, and then Z, all with this exact timing so events overlap"

As a QA: this bug will get downprioritised by PM to oblivion.

Re: Should QA exist?

#18

Post by sz4kerto »

fhd2 wrote: post #10
sz4kerto wrote: post #4

"Before I weigh in further, I’d like to make sure you’re familiar with the testing pyramid." The testing pyramid is a par excellance SWE kool-aid. Someone wrote a logically-sounding blogpost about it many years ago and then people started regurgitating it without any empirical evidence behind it. Many of us have realised that you need a "testing hourglass", not a "testing pyramid". Unit tests are universally consider…

> Isolated QA should not exist because anything a QA engineer can do manually can be automated. Well, sort of maybe, but it's not always economical. For a normal web app - yeah I guess. Depends on the complexity of the software and the environment / inputs it deals with. And then there's explorative testing, where I always found a good QA invaluable. Sure, you can also automate that to some degree. But someone who kn…

> And then there's explorative testing, where I always found a good QA invaluable.

Yes, I agree. We do this too. Findings are followed by a post-mortem-like process: - fix the problem - produce an automated test - evaluate why the feature wasn't autotested properly

Re: Should QA exist?

#20

Post by stingraycharles »

returnInfinity wrote: post #19

I think social media companies don't need that Enterprise software companies selling definitely need it. Customers ask was this tested? where is the test report?

It’s not even optional as soon as you’re getting close to any type of standards or compliance framework like SOC2 and the likes.
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