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Should QA exist?

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Re: Should QA exist?

#141

Post by Neywiny »

monster_truck wrote: post #139

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).

I think I agree with your first sentence but opposite to the second. People I've met who don't prioritize QA (or test, reviews, etc) often only shipped with a mad dash towards a schedule is king deadline. Only on times where we can slow down and do things right do they appreciate the investment and its resulting dividends.

Re: Should QA exist?

#142

Post by dotancohen »

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,…

  > They don’t always make me happy (in the moment) with their bugs or with how they decide to break the software, but in the end it makes a better, more resilient product.
Did you try with 2 QA people? 65536 QA people? 0 QA people? NULL QA people?

Re: Should QA exist?

#143

Post by mixmastamyk »

ryanmcbride wrote: post #135

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 a…

Yes, and paying more for the same work.

Re: Should QA exist?

#144

Post by GarnetFloride »

Yes, QA should exist, and should be managed by Operations.

I've been places where devs have no idea what the product-as a whole-does. They just work on the feature of the sprint and throw the code over the wall. Their testing consists of if: it compiled==it passed. They have no idea how to even start actually testing if it's not on the happy path.

I been in places where the code accomplished the spec, but in the most lazy way possible so it appeared to work but was useless outside of what the tests looked for.

I knew one QA guy that was amazing but was so overloaded because management kept hiring "cheap" QA that were actively making his life worse.

I'm a tech writer right now at a tech company and a dev just sent over an LLM generated "doc" that's referring to things that don't exist.

Neither management nor dev has learned anything from Therac-25. QA is hard.

Re: Should QA exist?

#145

Post by try-working »

You need to scale up QA. You need a way for them to share their work with whichever harness you're using. QA will improve the quality of your code base immensely, and they will increase speed of development, and reduce costs.

Re: Should QA exist?

#146

Post by alsetmusic »

Fuck off. I was a QA engineer and I helped prevent all kinds of unusual bugs that tests would never find because they required specific workflows to uncover them. Not that I was some genius who knew all the best workflows to test… but when I was randomly poking around and a crash or other unwanted behavior presented, I was methodical about working out the exact steps that led to the repro and I wrote actionable bug reports and collected useable environment data.

Also, I worked tech support for a number of years and I've watched all kinds of unexpected ways that people would interact with their devices. I always did all the weird stuff that most of us wouldn't consider when operating software:

"Why would someone drag every file to the desktop before they opened them?"

"I don't know, but I saw someone who always did that so I tried it."

Re: Should QA exist?

#147

Post by Zeik »

I agreed 100% with beginning but I got lost with the automatic verification engineers. Especially with the part starting with “ You also need to level up your skills in the testing and deployment lifecycle….” How do you know what skills the qa person possesses? This sounds exactly like the things I might hear from developer explaining how I should do my work and what tools I should use.

Test automation is not same coding that developers do. I don’t mean from quality point but they have completely different set of things that matter. Unlike writer here may think while it is important to have tests that pass or fail fast the performance is not one of the most important characteristics. You see tests are run less often than the code and not all tests need to run every time or even every day. One of the most important characteristics of a good test is something developers easily overlook. It is maintainability. When code is written then it’s tested and then it sits in codebase until refactored. Tests don’t get this. Tests work on environment that is under constant change (especially in shift left) that makes maintainability and abstraction layers much more important with test automation code than with developing a feature.

Something to note that some developers do not understand testing at all. They may think it’s all about getting tests passed or getting software broken. It’s not either of those. It’s just checking that software works like expected in different scenarios.

Because of those two things: code maintainability and (mis)understanding testing in deeper level, some developers do great tests and enjoy good qa as resulting product gets better. And then there are developers that struggle with all of that and usually with their developing as well.

Re: Should QA exist?

#150

Post by Pannoniae »

somewhereoutth wrote: post #9

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…

Sad to see you being downvoted, but you're exactly right. Well, almost - if you can afford to invest in a good integration test suite, that can catch many errors without requiring a human to regression-test every time.

At the same time, many quality attributes can't really be automatically tested, so automation shouldn't try to replace manual testing, it should be used to augment it.

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