71–80 of 160 posts
"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…
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> Unit tests are very expensive and return little value Why are unit tests very expensive? This goes against everything I know.
Unit tests very roughly double the amount of effort required to make any meaningful change to your codebase. They are also require maintenance same as ordinary code - but the customer does not care in the slightest whether or not they pass. On the other side, they can only really tell you about low level bugs that you already expected, they cannot surface system level bugs - the actual hard bugs that cause problems f…
A great QA can understand the features of a product quickly, turn those concepts into some sort of grid or matrix in their mind, then pull a bunch of paths and scenarios with estimated priorities and probabilities at a fast and efficient pace, all with great coverage. They can also identify features contradicting each other more quickly than product people.
I think a good QA is capable of being a great vibe coder nowadays, too. If you can write great test suites (write names only), agents nowadays are able to turn those specs into decent codebases. Comparatively, I know a lot of decent dev having not very good taste in testing, who often write overlapping tests or missing important paths.
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 b…
Sorry. No 'blue screens' or stack traces in my pacemaker or insulin pump, please.
As someone who holds a degree in Medicine besides his degree in Computer Science and works in medical devices, can I just please emphasise that QA should exist in this industry and is well deserved? Sorry. No 'blue screens' or stack traces in my pacemaker or insulin pump, please.
they have screens?!? /s
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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…
Ive almost never worked on a project where there was the right number of QAs who were doing the right thing. Usually there either arent any in which case bugs get missed or there are 5 very cheap ones running mindless scripts who are standing in for the devs' inability or unwillingness to write decent automated tests but dont catch the really deep level thorny stuff.
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.
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Really? The best people I worked with were never QA. Moreover, the best QAs would almost always try to be not QA - to shift into a better respected and better paid field. I wish it werent so (hence my username) but there is a definite class divide between devs and QA and it shows up not just in terms of the pay packets but also who gets the boot in down times and who gets listened to. This definitely affects the qual…
We have differing experiences, which shouldn't be surprising. My example explicitly referred to someone who was a good engineer who enjoyed the QA role. This might have been an Apple/MS thing, but we always had very technical QA people on the dev tools team. For example, the QA lead for the C++ compiler had written their own compiler from scratch and was an amazing contributor.
This was all unfortunate, and I agree in principle with having a separate test org, but in Windows the culture unfortunately seemed to be built around testers as second-class software developers.