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Should QA exist?

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Re: Should QA exist?

#51

Post by ivan_gammel »

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…

> because anything a QA engineer can do manually can be automated.

Looks like you never worked with a decent QA team and do not understand the full scope of quality management. They have plenty of creative tasks not aligned with other roles.

Re: Should QA exist?

#52

Post by jagged-chisel »

darkwater wrote: post #41

"Engineers sometimes exhibit an arrogance that they can do everyone else’s job," This rings so many bells that it feels like some Buddhist festival. Apply the same approach to QA, Operations, and anything outside the actual product development: when this arrogance was shared between bosses and developers, all good on their side. Now with the AI, the arrogance is staying only on the bosses' side, and we have developer…

But, as someone who’s agile and adaptable, I can do any job. That doesn’t mean I can do them all simultaneously. It doesn’t mean I can be the full-time loan officer and the full-time app developer.

Can I do your job? Yep. Can I also, at the same time, be the engineer that optimizes the IT systems? No - one of these jobs will suffer.

Give me the chance to understand your job, and I’ll replace as much of it as possible with code to do the same thing. But what it won’t do is have good judgement. It will make decisions on actual data - accurate data, erroneous data, it doesn’t care.

I think this is an interesting place to put “AI” - can it take input in the form of data and historical decisions, and come to a new decision from recent data? The same decision a human would?

Re: Should QA exist?

#53

Post by ivan_gammel »

somewhereoutth wrote: post #9

If your product is used by humans, then it needs to be tested by humans - this cannot be automated. Those humans can be your QA people, or your customers. Perhaps your customers are happy to be testers, perhaps not. Unit tests are very expensive and return little value. Conversely, a (manual?) 'smoke test' is very cheap and returns great value - the first thing you do when updating a server for example is to check it…

Automated tests are no longer expensive to write and nowadays less expensive to execute.

Re: Should QA exist?

#54

Post by 9wzYQbTYsAIc »

jeremyjh wrote: post #42
ottoflux wrote: post #15

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,…

Agreed. QA specialists are there to think about what the engineer didn't think about. Unless the engineer is incompetent or the organization is broken, the engineer has already written tests for everything they could think of, but they can't think of everything. More importantly, it is almost impossible for engineers to be as well incentivized to spend extra time exploring edge cases in something they already believe…

> More importantly, it is almost impossible for engineers to be as well incentivized to spend extra time exploring edge cases in something they already believe to work than to ship a feature on time.

Personal liability and professional insurance works for all the actual “professions” in the US, to some extent, right?

It might be time to start the considerations for professional licensing for platform scale or commercially published software.

Re: Should QA exist?

#55

Post by ivan_gammel »

9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote: post #54
jeremyjh wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. QA specialists are there to think about what the engineer didn't think about. Unless the engineer is incompetent or the organization is broken, the engineer has already written tests for everything they could think of, but they can't think of everything. More importantly, it is almost impossible for engineers to be as well incentivized to spend extra time exploring edge cases in something they already believe…

> More importantly, it is almost impossible for engineers to be as well incentivized to spend extra time exploring edge cases in something they already believe to work than to ship a feature on time. Personal liability and professional insurance works for all the actual “professions” in the US, to some extent, right? It might be time to start the considerations for professional licensing for platform scale or commerc…

More like certified products. New ISO standard may require professional liability for software products, which will be adopted as requirement by big consumers and will pull the industry into certification loop, because insurers will ask for it. This will obviously put a high entry barrier to many product categories, slowing down innovation.

Re: Should QA exist?

#56

Post by IAmBroom »

stingraycharles wrote: post #48
9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t understand the reasoning here why QA shouldn’t be engineering. Who watches the watcher, right? That aside, the core idea is the same as the principles of independent audit, peer review, or even simply just specialization. Red team / Blue team?

Yes but both the red team and blue team would still be engineering.

The red team and blue team should not share supervisors.

Nor, in the case of QA, should the audit team be engineers trained to act and think like the ones who wrote the software. A fresh perspective is useful.

But in the long run, supervisory independence is the real deal. I know of a QA manager who shut down an entire factory's output until a major safety issue (that had been kicked down the road several times) was addressed. It took chutzpah, and serious power, to do that. The Dir. of Engrg. would NEVER have allowed it.

Re: Should QA exist?

#57

Post by IAmBroom »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #52
darkwater wrote: post #41

"Engineers sometimes exhibit an arrogance that they can do everyone else’s job," This rings so many bells that it feels like some Buddhist festival. Apply the same approach to QA, Operations, and anything outside the actual product development: when this arrogance was shared between bosses and developers, all good on their side. Now with the AI, the arrogance is staying only on the bosses' side, and we have developer…

But, as someone who’s agile and adaptable, I can do any job. That doesn’t mean I can do them all simultaneously. It doesn’t mean I can be the full-time loan officer and the full-time app developer. Can I do your job? Yep. Can I also, at the same time, be the engineer that optimizes the IT systems? No - one of these jobs will suffer. Give me the chance to understand your job, and I’ll replace as much of it as possible…

Thank you for embodying and exemplifying the point, albeit ironically.

Re: Should QA exist?

#58

Post by ozlikethewizard »

darkwater wrote: post #41

"Engineers sometimes exhibit an arrogance that they can do everyone else’s job," This rings so many bells that it feels like some Buddhist festival. Apply the same approach to QA, Operations, and anything outside the actual product development: when this arrogance was shared between bosses and developers, all good on their side. Now with the AI, the arrogance is staying only on the bosses' side, and we have developer…

Its also a fucking annoying sentiment for us as engineers. I dont want to do everyone else's job

Re: Should QA exist?

#59

Post by jagged-chisel »

IAmBroom wrote: post #57
jagged-chisel wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, as someone who’s agile and adaptable, I can do any job. That doesn’t mean I can do them all simultaneously. It doesn’t mean I can be the full-time loan officer and the full-time app developer. Can I do your job? Yep. Can I also, at the same time, be the engineer that optimizes the IT systems? No - one of these jobs will suffer. Give me the chance to understand your job, and I’ll replace as much of it as possible…

Thank you for embodying and exemplifying the point, albeit ironically.

Aside: it has become an interesting personal experiment to stop being obviously ironic and see how people read what I’ve written. The voting is telling.

Re: Should QA exist?

#60

Post by 9wzYQbTYsAIc »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #55
9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More importantly, it is almost impossible for engineers to be as well incentivized to spend extra time exploring edge cases in something they already believe to work than to ship a feature on time. Personal liability and professional insurance works for all the actual “professions” in the US, to some extent, right? It might be time to start the considerations for professional licensing for platform scale or commerc…

More like certified products. New ISO standard may require professional liability for software products, which will be adopted as requirement by big consumers and will pull the industry into certification loop, because insurers will ask for it. This will obviously put a high entry barrier to many product categories, slowing down innovation.

Yes, but slowing down to avoid hazards is sometimes important.

Medical devices and such are the only places I’d expect to see the need for certified products. By extension, in the new era, we really ought only expect certified software where we expect a duty to care from the software system (or any other assigned duty)

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