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Should QA exist?

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Re: Should QA exist?

#131

Post by D-Coder »

z500 wrote: post #113
ottoflux wrote: post #15

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,…

We don't have dedicated QA at my job, but personally I'm thrilled when a coworker finds a bug in my code. It's much more preferable to the customer finding it

Yes! I had a QA person apologize once for finding a bug in my code. I thanked him for not letting it make me look like an idiot.

Re: Should QA exist?

#132

Post by sanex »

blindriver wrote: post #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.

I have been having the same thought. Since I've stepped back into code in the past month I have written maybe 3 or 4 lines. Deleted more than that for sure. Most of the time has been spent babysitting and manual testing.

Re: Should QA exist?

#133

Post by zahlman »

> Perhaps the strongest argument nowadays for QA is that with AI, automated verification is a leverage maximizer.

That sure is a sequence of words.

It comes across to me like the emphasized part is arguing against what it's supposed to be arguing for.

Or is the premise that the developers somehow can't run the AI verifier?

Re: Should QA exist?

#134

Post by didip »

Yes, but should be supercharged with AI.

I’d like them to record their steps in details in videos and have AI dissected the steps into text descriptor that’s relevant to the code.

Re: Should QA exist?

#135

Post by ryanmcbride »

This is something I've put a lot of thought into the past couple of years, and a few little soundbites I've come up with during my imaginary shower interviews are:

1. If you don't have Quality Assurance, then you have Quality Uncertainty.

2. QA is a full time job. If you offload the responsibility of QA to the engineers, then you're giving them 2 full time jobs. So unless they're working 16 hours days (even if they are tbh), you aren't assuring quality, you're compromising it.

Re: Should QA exist?

#136

Post by ryanmcbride »

fragmede wrote: post #98
megadopechos wrote: post #82

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.

It's not just finding bugs, QA people are the people who actually USE the product, every part of it, every single day. They find pain points and things to improve and things that don't make sense constantly. But yes they're also really good at finding bugs.

Re: Should QA exist?

#137

Post by popularonion »

From many years of first hand experience:

- QA is always the first thing companies outsource, with predictable results

- Companies either go the route or “separate QA org with separate management chain” or “have QA engineers report to dev managers”. I’ve seen serious misaligned incentives and toxic outcomes with both

- Frequent Slack messages at 4:15 PM on Friday - “hey they just merged the PR, we really need it tested before Monday stand up”

- QA becomes a de facto dumping ground for glue work that other teams don’t want to do. Senior QA ends up morphing into a de facto “responsibility without authority” project manager role

- There is zero internet “community” around QA the way there is for developers or designers. There is no Slashdot or Hacker News for QA and there never will be. Just a bazaar of book authors and consultants promoting themselves on LinkedIn

IMO the only thing that makes sense anymore is having good SDETs embedded in engineering teams.

Re: Should QA exist?

#139

Post by monster_truck »

A good QA engineer is worth many multiples of their weight in gold.

I often find that devs who think otherwise have never had to ship anything against a drop dead date, or definitively prove that a supplier has not met a contractual obligation (after the normal engineers have found it to be their problem in the first place).

Re: Should QA exist?

#140

Post by ghywertelling »

MoreQARespect wrote: post #70
jeremyjh wrote: post #42

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…

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.

QA has a reputation problem. Because it is considered as unimportant role, good people don't get attracted to it. The average people who do don't do a good job.
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