Developers are liars. Why would I trust them to test their software?
Should QA exist?
31–40 of 160 posts
Re: Should QA exist?
#32I work with someone who does great QA work. They know how to rip something apart, they understand the user's non-technical perspective and approach, and they understand what edge cases to look out and they have the actual equipment to test on different physical devices (and so on). Most importantly, they have the diligence and patience to methodically test subtly different cases, which I frankly don't have. On the qu…
If all/most QA people were like this then no one would be complaining.
Sure, but this issue is not specific to QA. Any roles which you depend on with incompetent people occupying them will lead to issues and frustration.
Re: Should QA exist?
#33Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? If engineering owns quality, then engineering own all, up the chain. No need for anything and anybody. Which is the AI pipe dream, really. You are, in fact, with using AI, QA or coding or otherwise, externalizing services in hope the services will improve and costs will drop. Let me know how that goes without HITLs.
If engineering owns quality, it ought to also own the liability, too.
That would put the damper on the pipe dream pretty quick. Probably more healthily than any data center ban could ever do.
If engineers were licensed, bonded, and liable, things would go very differently.
* speaking as having been a practicing software “engineer” for a decade
Re: Should QA exist?
#34"Before I weigh in further, I’d like to make sure you’re familiar with the testing pyramid." The testing pyramid is a par excellance SWE kool-aid. Someone wrote a logically-sounding blogpost about it many years ago and then people started regurgitating it without any empirical evidence behind it. Many of us have realised that you need a "testing hourglass", not a "testing pyramid". Unit tests are universally consider…
> Isolated QA should not exist because anything a QA engineer can do manually can be automated. Well, sort of maybe, but it's not always economical. For a normal web app - yeah I guess. Depends on the complexity of the software and the environment / inputs it deals with. And then there's explorative testing, where I always found a good QA invaluable. Sure, you can also automate that to some degree. But someone who kn…
> it's not always economical. For a normal web app - yeah I guess
What do you define as "normal"? I can't think of anything harder to test than a web app.
Even a seemingly trivial static HTML site with some CSS on it will already have inconsistencies across every browser and device. Even if you fix all of that (unlikely), you still haven't done your WCAG compliance, SEO, etc.
The web is probably the best example case for needing a QA team.
Re: Should QA exist?
#35There are two very important ideas in this article, which I fully agree with: QA are not the only people responsible for quality - entire team is. QA act as experts and drivers of quality management process, but they should not and are not acting alone. They should have adversarial approach which is helpful on every stage of SDLC. Thus, few more items from my list why QA is useful in every engineering organization and why every team I hire has at least one QA starting from 4-5 people:
1. Quality management is a continuous process that starts with product discovery and business requirements. Developers often assume that requirements are clear and move on to building the happy path. QA often explore requirements in depth and ask a lot of good questions.
2. QA usually have the best knowledge of the product and help product managers to understand its current behavior, when new requirements suggest to change it.
3. The same applies to product design. Good designer never leaves the team with a few annotated screens, supporting developers until the product is shipped. Design QA - the verification of conformance of implementation to design specs - can be done with QA team, which can assist with automation of design-specific tests.
4. Customer support - QA people are natural partners of customer support organization, with their knowledge of the product, existing bugs and workarounds.
And just a story: on one of my previous jobs recently hired QA engineer spotted number error in an All Hands presentation. That was an immediate buy-in from founders. :)
Re: Should QA exist?
#36Yes. Without a doubt. I worked with a QA team for the last fifteen years until last year when they laid them all off. QA is a discrete skill in and of itself. I have never met a dev truly qualified to do QA. If you don't think this you have never worked with a good QA person. A good QA persons super power is finding weird broken interactions between features and layers where they meet. Things you would never think of…
> "what if I did X in one tab, Y in another, and then Z, all with this exact timing so events overlap" As a QA: this bug will get downprioritised by PM to oblivion.
Depends on what happens in that case, no?
If it messes up the UI until you refresh, yeah, I understand deprioritizing that.
If it causes catastrophic data corruption or leaks admin credentials, any sane PM would want that fixed ASAP.
Re: Should QA exist?
#37100% 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,…
> 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.
Re: Should QA exist?
#38Yes. Without a doubt. I worked with a QA team for the last fifteen years until last year when they laid them all off. QA is a discrete skill in and of itself. I have never met a dev truly qualified to do QA. If you don't think this you have never worked with a good QA person. A good QA persons super power is finding weird broken interactions between features and layers where they meet. Things you would never think of…
> "what if I did X in one tab, Y in another, and then Z, all with this exact timing so events overlap" As a QA: this bug will get downprioritised by PM to oblivion.
Not anyplace that cares about quality.
where I work it is normally easier to fix things than deprioritize to oblivion. I can fix an issue, but priority puts a dozen people in a meeting.
Re: Should QA exist?
#39Yes. Without a doubt. I worked with a QA team for the last fifteen years until last year when they laid them all off. QA is a discrete skill in and of itself. I have never met a dev truly qualified to do QA. If you don't think this you have never worked with a good QA person. A good QA persons super power is finding weird broken interactions between features and layers where they meet. Things you would never think of…
> "what if I did X in one tab, Y in another, and then Z, all with this exact timing so events overlap" As a QA: this bug will get downprioritised by PM to oblivion.
If anyone should not exist, it's PMs.
I kid a little, I worked with some very good PMs when we did client work who made my life much easier. Working on a SaaS though, I find them generally less than useful.
Re: Should QA exist?
#40Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? If engineering owns quality, then engineering own all, up the chain. No need for anything and anybody. Which is the AI pipe dream, really. You are, in fact, with using AI, QA or coding or otherwise, externalizing services in hope the services will improve and costs will drop. Let me know how that goes without HITLs.
If engineering owns quality, it ought to also own the liability, too. That would put the damper on the pipe dream pretty quick. Probably more healthily than any data center ban could ever do. If engineers were licensed, bonded, and liable, things would go very differently. * speaking as having been a practicing software “engineer” for a decade
Applies to making bread or brain surgery. Sometimes things go wrong and people are accounted for.
But since CEOs, or any other bosses, need to make a living, they will eat the liability in exchange for wealth, and leave engineering in the dust.