Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Should QA exist?

rubick.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 160 posts

Re: Should QA exist?

#81

Post by LatencyKills »

stiglitz wrote: post #80
LatencyKills wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have differing experiences, which shouldn't be surprising. My example explicitly referred to someone who was a good engineer who enjoyed the QA role. This might have been an Apple/MS thing, but we always had very technical QA people on the dev tools team. For example, the QA lead for the C++ compiler had written their own compiler from scratch and was an amazing contributor.

In the Windows team (back before the test org was decimated) I saw the described "class divide". Anybody who was good enough would switch from SDET to SDE [disclaimer: obviously there were some isolated exceptions]. The test team produced reams of crappy test frameworks, each of which seemed like a "proving project" for its creators to show they could be competent SDEs. After the Great Decimation my dev team took own…

I spent most of my time working on Visual Studio (in the Boston time frame) so we got to interact with pretty much every team. I absolutely hated interacting with the Windows team. Everything was a fight for no reason.

As I said above, everyone has their own experiences but the QA folks I worked with at MS were fantastic.

Not sure if you're aware but Dave Plumber now has a really good YT channel [0] where he talks about MS back in those days. It's a fun walk down memory lane.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/@DavesGarage

Re: Should QA exist?

#82

Post by megadopechos »

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.

Re: Should QA exist?

#83

Post by jghn »

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,…

The tension is that QA is important. But most QA practitioners are not good. The world is filled with QA people who couldn't make it as an SWE and now are button pushers. But high quality QA people are amazing. These are the ones who understand how to break apart a system, push it to its limits, and engineer the quality plan.

This is an area where I expect AI to create a bimodal future. The smaller group of high quality QA people will now be able to offload the activity to agents instead of the QA drones. They'll still be worth their weight in gold, whereas the drones will be redundant.

Re: Should QA exist?

#84

Post by malfist »

jghn wrote: post #83
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,…

The tension is that QA is important. But most QA practitioners are not good. The world is filled with QA people who couldn't make it as an SWE and now are button pushers. But high quality QA people are amazing. These are the ones who understand how to break apart a system, push it to its limits, and engineer the quality plan. This is an area where I expect AI to create a bimodal future. The smaller group of high qual…

I've worked with a lot of QA folks that just repackage up the unit tests the dev already writes. And I've met a few that strikes out on their own and comes up with real tests.

The latter is much more high touch, but they're often worth their weight in gold. The former is kinda pointless.

Re: Should QA exist?

#85

Post by darth_aardvark »

canpan wrote: post #29
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,…

Yes, QA is important. My code will always "work" in that everything I tested is bug free. But having someone other test, especially someone who knows the service is gold. But there is also bad QA: The most worthless QA I was forced to work with, was an external company, where I, as developer, had to write the test sheet and they just tested that. Obviously they could not find bugs as I tested everything on the sheet.…

> But there is also bad QA: The most worthless QA I was forced to work with, was an external company, where I, as developer, had to write the test sheet and they just tested that. Obviously they could not find bugs as I tested everything on the sheet.

This was my sole experience at the one place I worked with an internal QA team. They absolutely could never find bugs that devs missed, often mis-marked ones that didn't exist, and failed to find obvious edge cases that did exist.

Multiple devs fired because the CEO believed the QA over the engineering team; if they marked a bug as present, it was the engineer's fault for writing it. If they didn't catch a bug that made it to prod, it was the engineer's fault for not including it in the test plan. They represented nothing but red tape and provided no value.

Good QA sounds great! I'd love to know what that's like someday! It'd be great to have someone testing my code and finding breakages I missed! I'm only slightly (incredibly) bitter about my bad experience with its implementation.

Re: Should QA exist?

#86

Post by fatbird »

There's a basic loop that goes on regardless:

1. define a requirement 2. implement the requirement 3. verify that the requirement was implemented

TDD was built around the idea that 1 and 3 could be unified in automated testing, and that's certainly true for a large part of it. But QA as a discrete role needs to exist because, beyond verifying that 2 was done correctly, they expose higher level bugs in 1, the requirements themselves.

It's virtually impossible to define requirements completely and without second order interactions that cause problems. QA is as effective at exposing assumptions and handwaving by the people who created the wireframes or the visual design as by the developers failing to test their own work.

And ideally, this leads to the cycle being virtuous: higher quality starts at the requirements phase, not the implentation phase. It's not just that QA should work closely with the engineers--the engineers need to work closely with UX and VD to ensure they fully understand the requirements. The incentives are aligned among all parties.

Re: Should QA exist?

#87

Post by jghn »

malfist wrote: post #84
jghn wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tension is that QA is important. But most QA practitioners are not good. The world is filled with QA people who couldn't make it as an SWE and now are button pushers. But high quality QA people are amazing. These are the ones who understand how to break apart a system, push it to its limits, and engineer the quality plan. This is an area where I expect AI to create a bimodal future. The smaller group of high qual…

I've worked with a lot of QA folks that just repackage up the unit tests the dev already writes. And I've met a few that strikes out on their own and comes up with real tests. The latter is much more high touch, but they're often worth their weight in gold. The former is kinda pointless.

Exactly. I think AI tooling will make that good group even more effective. And it will make the bad group even more pointless.

Re: Should QA exist?

#88

Post by gorgoiler »

The best QA isn’t just about finding bugs. It’s about bringing quality to the codebase: typing, better static analysis, linters, and useful libraries. In the other direction, it’s also about integrating into the release process by using integrating the what-goes-on / what-stays-in-beta decisions into quality’s approach to giving signal over any other part of the codebase.

Anything that involves gating bits of code, basically, and deciding whether to gate bits of code or not.

Re: Should QA exist?

#89

Post by mobilene »

I was in testing for 17 years before moving back into Engineering. I have spent my time in Engineering leading teams to push quality left. But I think it's better to say "quality is a system" than to say "engineers own quality." What are you building into your SDLC that makes sure quality happens? Testing is just a part of that, and not even the biggest one.

Re: Should QA exist?

#90

Post by pixl97 »

MoreQARespect wrote: post #68
LatencyKills wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I spent 20 years split between MS and Apple. Some of the best people I ever worked with were in QA. One guy in particular was an extremely talented engineer who simply didn't enjoy the canonical "coding" role; what he did enjoy was finding bugs and breaking things. ;-)

Really? The best people I worked with were never QA. Moreover, the best QAs would almost always try to be not QA - to shift into a better respected and better paid field. I wish it werent so (hence my username) but there is a definite class divide between devs and QA and it shows up not just in terms of the pay packets but also who gets the boot in down times and who gets listened to. This definitely affects the qual…

I mean the people that come up thru QA may be the best while getting enough time in the company to go to a position that pays.

But yea, so many companies cheap their QA and then wonders why their QA sucks.

Post reply on HN