91–100 of 160 posts
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…
> Moreover, the best QAs would almost always try to be not QA - to shift into a better respected and better paid field.
That sort of seems circular. If they're not respected or paid well, of course most of the talented people would not want to remain in QA, and eventually you'd just have mediocre QA. That doesn't really give you any insight into whether high quality QA would be useful though.
(edit: I see now that's basically the point you're trying to make, so I guess we're in agreement)
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, b…
Except I worked at a company with a QA department made up of entirely "Automated Verification Engineers" ... over a decade ago. And the head of the department had taught at a local QA school (so presumably other QA engineers learned that style of work from her also).
Good QA departments switched to this mode long before AI was even a thing! Maybe 90+% of QA departments didn't work that way pre-AI, but there certainly were ones that did!
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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.
Interesting username
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.…
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.
"Engineers sometimes exhibit an arrogance that they can do everyone else’s job," This rings so many bells that it feels like some Buddhist festival. Apply the same approach to QA, Operations, and anything outside the actual product development: when this arrogance was shared between bosses and developers, all good on their side. Now with the AI, the arrogance is staying only on the bosses' side, and we have developer…
Its also a fucking annoying sentiment for us as engineers. I dont want to do everyone else's job
But I've worked at places with a whole spectrum of coverage in roles spanning Product Mgrs, Project Mgrs, BAs, QAs, production support level 1, production support level 2, etc. The one constant is whatever is missing or understaffed just ends up getting done by engineers.
Testing, on-call, Jira managing, requirements gathering with users, analysis, etc... all falls on to engineering. Then management gets even more wound up about dev productivity/velocity, etc.