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Should QA exist?

rubick.com

121–130 of 160 posts

Re: Should QA exist?

#121

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.

Engineering like the guy in the booth at a show is a sound engineer. Talented: check; challenging work: check; valuable: check; creative: check. "Engineering" like designing a building, bridge, or power line? Nope.

It's not a protected term in the US so it's jarring to those of us living where it is.

Re: Should QA exist?

#122

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…

The idea that test coverage equates to well-tested software is one of the unfortunate consequences of MBAs killing QA departments.

Re: Should QA exist?

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't "vote" but there aren't many clues in your comment suggesting it's satire. It is a mainstream presentation of a mainstream point of view, how would anybody distinguish between you believing it earnestly and you mocking it?

Re: Should QA exist?

#125
As someone who believed firmly that QA is a dying/dead profession, after moving over to AI coding over the last 6 months, I think coding is dead and QA and code reviews are what will remain after the aftermath of AI coding. Being able to test the output of AI to make sure it is doing what you want it to do is most of my job now.

Re: Should QA exist?

#126
At a previous job, the team I was on [1] had a dedicated QA engineer (unofficially---he was the only QA engineer that ever worked with our team). Before we got bought, we worked closely with the QA engineer. He had access to the source repo, could compile and test our stuff, and we constantly told him of new features we were working on to give him a heads up. During this time, we were our customer's (yes, we only worked with one customer, who was paying us seven figures per month for service) favorite vendor. Over the 10 years or so of this time, we had like two regressions hit production, and those were found during deployment and we could roll back immediately.

We then got bought out and new management put in. They siloed QA and made it impossible for us to even talk to them about what we were doing. Within a year, we had one deployment fail four times in a row and went from favorite vendor to "utter trash vendor we can't get rid of." Our QA engineer quit, as well as the rest of the team (I was the last to leave). I'm still surprised they still have that customer.

[1] We were the only team having to deal with SS7. It wasn't easy hiring programmers for it, and I think at the highest head count, we had like five members (including the manager when we had one [2], but not including QA, which was "officially" never a part of our team).

[2] If it was tough hiring programmers to deal with SS7, it was even harder to hire managers to deal with programmers dealing with SS7. I think for half the time I was there (over 10 years) I had no official manager and reported to a director or higher in the company.

Re: Should QA exist?

#127
QA should always exist. The question is just do you want to pay for them. Usually the preferred gaslighting is "without QA devs will do better testing", but it's always about money.

Re: Should QA exist?

#128
QA should exist.

QA should not be forced into an engineering or automation track because the incentives are wrong. You end up with test code becoming the goal and then it usually rots due to most QA not having the experience to create a codebase that scales.

I don't think the industry today understands how to treat QA and I think that leads to a lot of assumptions that it's not useful.

Re: Should QA exist?

#130

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,…

It should be under engineering but as a seperate skill/role. To ship fast you want QA aligned with milestones, sprints etc. You want QA to feel the deadlines, and then like an Eng push up if things aren't realistic.

What I have seen before with QA is a queue like system. Hand to QA. get back in 3 days. Not the QA persons fault. It is the setup if the org that is wrong.

Imagine if you had a code review role and code review team and you had to wait to get your code OKed. We wouldn't put up with it.

QA teams seperate from Eng worked when the software was burned to CD rather than uploaded to s3.

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