101–110 of 160 posts
The article seems to equate QA with testing, which is a short-sighted view. QA also includes things like standards, and importantly, design and code reviews, which are actually the best way to improve quality.
The real reason many software orgs nowadays don't have QA is for the simple reason that it's slow. Everything in the consumer tech space is about rapid growth, and moving as fast as possible. Nobody cares very much that the software has bugs, what matters is whether it has users.
But outside of consumer tech, QA is a lot more common, since it matters a lot more that the software's logic is correct. (Speaking personally - I used to work for a genetics lab, and we had QA.) There are just different economic incentives involved.
That being said, QA is definitely an important aspect of software development - regardless of who owns this work. Imo, instead of having a QA engineer per team or a few teams, you should have a QA shape role (similar to AVE you mentioned) that oversees a large area like an Org and pushes hard to make sure quality standards are held high across teams.
It's also trivial for engineers these days to have great e2e automated test coverage with AI. We're actually building getlark.ai that helps engineers with this.
I built products at Stripe as an engineer and never worked with an explicit QA team. Each team was responsible for the quality to a large extent. That being said, QA is definitely an important aspect of software development - regardless of who owns this work. Imo, instead of having a QA engineer per team or a few teams, you should have a QA shape role (similar to AVE you mentioned) that oversees a large area like an…
"QA" should exist regardless of whether you think dedicated software testing staff fit into your org. The whole team is responsible for assuring quality.
Dedicated software testers verify that the solution actually does what it's meant to do, and good software testers become deeply knowledgeable about the product and how features interact. They are ultimately a second pair of eyes, and should have a direct line to product owners or customers.
This can't be automated. The ongoing tests for verifying existing features continue to work without regression can and should be automated (throughout the dev process), adding generative AI to the human verification step is a recipe for disaster.
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,…
When I got started in software, QA was already in a heavy decline. A mentor who had been a QA manager at Apple told me that being a QA person (in the industry) was once seen as a high-trust position. He was sad at what it became.
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,…
Couldn't agree more strongly. The best QA people have the old-school “test to break” mentality. They do weird things, like pulling the network cable out of their machine mid-transaction, or kicking off a series of performance scripts and then powering off servers in a distributed system just to see what happens. When I got started in software, QA was already in a heavy decline. A mentor who had been a QA manager at A…
I would ask anyone that thinks QA is unnecessary to spend a few days on an actual aerospace production line. Software and hardware get EXCESSIVE QA. For good reason.