Asking developers to do QA is broken – why anyone should own QA
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Asking developers to do QA is broken – why anyone should own QA
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Re: Asking developers to do QA is broken – why anyone should own QA
#2I think product owners should do (manual) QA. On their own, and when necessary for scalability reasons also via a small team under their direct control.
Re: Asking developers to do QA is broken – why anyone should own QA
#3I've been on teams where the "siloed" QA model seemed to work pretty well -- we seemed to find a decent balance between test coverage and frequency of releases.
But this was at a cash-rich startup that had lots of money to spend on making sure we had plenty of QA headcount. That seems to be the exception, rather than the rule. Lots of startups I talk to are quite constrained in terms of dedicated QA, so the argument for empowering product managers to own quality does make some sense to me.
Re: Asking developers to do QA is broken – why anyone should own QA
#4I think product owners should do (manual) QA. On their own, and when necessary for scalability reasons also via a small team under their direct control.
+1 - I think they should be able to for sure - with current tooling, this is basically impossible without manually doing it; which I've seen a lot of product folks do!
Re: Asking developers to do QA is broken – why anyone should own QA
#5I think product owners should do (manual) QA. On their own, and when necessary for scalability reasons also via a small team under their direct control.
Yeah, this is the only thing that practically worked, in a complex product I used to work on.
- If you ask the devs to do QA, you'll get no bugs other than the ones they already caught during testing and deployment.
- If you have a mostly independent QA team, they will find somewhat silly/trivial bugs like the login page not working in an extreme edge case scenario.
- However, when you ask your Product team to own QA, you get the real good stuff - "Why does this feature not actually work well with this other feature when you combine the configuration" etc. It's great!
Re: Asking developers to do QA is broken – why anyone should own QA
#6With more folks building using low code and no-code tools many different types of users will need to know how to do QA
Re: Asking developers to do QA is broken – why anyone should own QA
#7I think product owners should do (manual) QA. On their own, and when necessary for scalability reasons also via a small team under their direct control.
Yeah, this is the only thing that practically worked, in a complex product I used to work on. - If you ask the devs to do QA, you'll get no bugs other than the ones they already caught during testing and deployment. - If you have a mostly independent QA team, they will find somewhat silly/trivial bugs like the login page not working in an extreme edge case scenario. - However, when you ask your Product team to own QA…
When I was a PM, I was lucky to have a big, talented QA team, but I still knew I'd have to do a "smoke test" myself after every major feature release. I cared the most, and I knew the most about the intricacies of the product.
Re: Asking developers to do QA is broken – why anyone should own QA
#8The last place I worked would pull devs randomly to do QA tasks when QA got behind. Of course, since we weren't trained in the QA processes, and didn't do it all the time, it often wound up taking longer to do the testing, plus the devs would get behind in their tasks.
Re: Asking developers to do QA is broken – why anyone should own QA
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, this is the only thing that practically worked, in a complex product I used to work on. - If you ask the devs to do QA, you'll get no bugs other than the ones they already caught during testing and deployment. - If you have a mostly independent QA team, they will find somewhat silly/trivial bugs like the login page not working in an extreme edge case scenario. - However, when you ask your Product team to own QA…
When I was a PM, I was lucky to have a big, talented QA team, but I still knew I'd have to do a "smoke test" myself after every major feature release. I cared the most, and I knew the most about the intricacies of the product.
I really recognize that feeling.
Also: Bliss is when you as a product owner get to such a place that you trust the QA team that you've worked with so closely so much that you only have have to some basic tests a few hours after the release.
Re: Asking developers to do QA is broken – why anyone should own QA
#10Love the idea, but have you met product owners?