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Asking developers to do QA is broken – why anyone should own QA

rainforestqa.com

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Re: Asking developers to do QA is broken – why anyone should own QA

#61

Post by ukd1 »

wefarrell wrote: post #56
ukd1 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want something it's closer to, it's sikuli script. Visually looking at the page (or whatever, tbh), then manipulating it using the keyboard and mouse. It's basically done using a KVM, so much closer to what a user would be able to see and do than something like cucumber or gherkin. However, we also allow you to test using a crowd of humans, should folks need more nuanced feedback about things, or have much mor…

Engineers should absolutely be writing unit tests and integration tests for their APIs. Personally I find that it brings a lot more integrity and a sense of ownership into the process when engineers are required to deliver tests. I disagree with the problem's that you mention in this article: Developers aren’t incentivized to prioritize QA testing Developers are typically evaluated based on the quantity of software t…

Thanks. I agree re unit-tests and integration tests. Mostly we're focused on (and talking about) testing what humans end up using directly - e.g. interfaces to web apps or mobile apps.

I think you're wrong re:organizational problems, it's part of it - but most developers (in my expereince) do not want to do QA outside of unit-tests and maybe integration tests. They want to write code, and ship things. Automation, at least traditionally is brittle as well as slow to write, and few love it. Whilst tooling like Cypress does improve things over Selenium, still, I've not met a developer that actually enjoys that kind of testing.

Re: Asking developers to do QA is broken – why anyone should own QA

#62

Post by MattGaiser »

failwhaleshark wrote: post #46
MattGaiser wrote: post #33

Why can’t the QA people just live on the dev team? Why do they need to be siloed away or not exist? I had this in my past job. Have 1 QA per two developers, the QA sits with those two developers, and you are constantly telling them when a build is done and on staging. They write tests, do some manual checks, and then tell you how it is going relatively immediately. They also handle the problem of reproducing bugs and…

Terrible idea. The dev team manager is focused on growing new features in the next release. QA is focused on the excellent of the current release. Subordinating quality to new releases is the result. In a similar situation, devops supposedly addressed similar tensions of dev and ops.

I agree in theory and there are certainly teams where this could happen, but what happened on this team was that the bugs were found so quickly than the fixes were also quick (I would always get a bug report the same day and often within the hour), making shipping stuff with few bugs relatively painless.

Was there pressure to keep releasing? Yes. But with the rapid feedback, it never became too onerous to get them done anyway.

Re: Asking developers to do QA is broken – why anyone should own QA

#63

Post by [deleted] »

travisjungroth wrote: post #17
nullspace wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is the only thing that practically worked, in a complex product I used to work on. - If you ask the devs to do QA, you'll get no bugs other than the ones they already caught during testing and deployment. - If you have a mostly independent QA team, they will find somewhat silly/trivial bugs like the login page not working in an extreme edge case scenario. - However, when you ask your Product team to own QA…

On independent QA teams finding trivial bugs, I think this is a social problem. Specifically an alignment one. If a bug goes out, whose fault is it? Eng for making it or QA for not finding it? The answers are different at different orgs, and they have more to do with power dynamics than anything else. QA is pretty easy to fake (for a while). The last thing you want to do is quality check your QA team. So the further…

[deleted]

Re: Asking developers to do QA is broken – why anyone should own QA

#64

Post by alistairSH »

innagadadavida wrote: post #42
MattGaiser wrote: post #33

Why can’t the QA people just live on the dev team? Why do they need to be siloed away or not exist? I had this in my past job. Have 1 QA per two developers, the QA sits with those two developers, and you are constantly telling them when a build is done and on staging. They write tests, do some manual checks, and then tell you how it is going relatively immediately. They also handle the problem of reproducing bugs and…

> Why can’t the QA people just live on the dev team? Because there is little incentive for devs to police themselves and there could be multiple dev teams spanning client/server that needs to be integrated and tested. A slightly better org to own QA would be product team.

Each team should have some QA resources. Server can be tested independent of client, etc. Then the QA staff work together to ensure appropriate systems integration tests.

Siloed QA team runs the risk of becoming a bottleneck as work from disparate teams comes through.

Re: Asking developers to do QA is broken – why anyone should own QA

#65

Post by sytse »

I agree with not asking the developers of the feature. I don't think it should be part of product. QA is a deeply technical job. At GitLab QA gets own department called Quality. They are on the same level as development, design, development, and infrastructure. The people in it are mostly Software engineers in test. For more information please see https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/quality/

Re: Asking developers to do QA is broken – why anyone should own QA

#66

Post by flippinburgers »

I recently finished working as a team lead in a small startup company in a foreign land where I do not speak the language fluently. The entire team aside from one member were unable to speak or write in English.

We had no "QA" team. The director of engineering expected us to do our own QA. He expected me to make sure it happened. This project consisted of breaking up an existing system into three parts: a backend and two separate frontends. New technology was involved and parity + additional new features were expected. The team was small. Half of the six engineers were not performing as expected for a variety of reasons.

This thing broke me.

In order to try to attain what he was asking for evidence was required. Screenshots, gifs, explanations in PRs.

I was removed from the position of team manager just two months before release and replaced by a native speaker.

Yes I am bringing my weird personal anecdote into the conversation, but not having people who were specifically there to do testing was soul crushing.

Re: Asking developers to do QA is broken – why anyone should own QA

#67

Post by japorized »

failwhaleshark wrote: post #47
GaveUp wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key part in that is communication. That’s makes all the difference whether it be with BA’s, QA’s, or the end user. Speeds up the development cycle and greatly reduces the number of bugs. The best experience I had was on a team that had essentially 2 BA’s and 7 devs. There was constant communication to clarify actual requirements, devs would build automated tests off them, BA’s would test against the requirements…

Communication is great until someone becomes unreasonable and doesn't want to do something. Trust but the chain-of-command must verify. Shouldn't need to, but it should be there as insurance.

People don’t just randomly become unreasonable halfway through. If they’d be unreasonable, they’d do so from the start. If it happens midway, there’s almost always some reason. That said, I do I agree that the chain of command should always be aware of what’s going on, or have a reliable way to find out.

Re: Asking developers to do QA is broken – why anyone should own QA

#69

Post by cwkoss »

This is a superlative blogspam sales pitch.

Maybe their tool helps? but these sorts of self-justifying articles are just untrustworthy marketing babble. Big turnoff to me. I stopped reading halfway through, do they ever mention the pros of alternatives or is this purely arguing "here is why our company is the only good solution"?

Re: Asking developers to do QA is broken – why anyone should own QA

#70

Post by TameAntelope »

tpmx wrote: post #2

I think product owners should do (manual) QA. On their own, and when necessary for scalability reasons also via a small team under their direct control.

They don't have time, so they'd have to scale it, and once you scale it you basically are building a siloed QA team anyway.
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