111–120 of 160 posts
It's terrifying without that support. The beancounter level mgt does not Get It that it's cheaper to have this kind of support now than much later in the product cycle.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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” I don’t understand the reasoning here why QA shouldn’t be engineering.
Frankly, calling software development engineering is quite debatable. We should be calling less things engineering that aren't actually engineering qualifications.
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,…
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,…
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…
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47503348
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,…
Great QA people are rarer than great developers, and potentially even more valuable.
This is a big asset in the current paradigm where a LLM agent can effectively implement behavior only when given a robust test suite to iterate against.
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…
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…
Absolutely QA "should" exist. Our QAs are the most knowledgeable people on our product, often informing devs and product alike of requirements, missing requirements, weird configuration outliers, how to actually use the damned app, etc. Without QA we would be developing and testing for brittle requirements to get code into an MVP state, not a functional, user-friendly state.
"Should" is one of those words. QA absolutely should not exist. Developers should not write buggy code to begin with! But they do, so QA (in some form) must exist for software to be any good.