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Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

I have done it both ways for many years

… I have done it both ways for many years. I have worked on teams where QA is a frustrating nuisance, and teams where they were critical to success. I have worked on teams that did pretty good without them, and probably those were the highest throughput, most productive teams because the engineers were forced to own all the consequences - every bug they shipped was a production issue they were immediately forced to track down and resolve. But those were very small teams, and eventually I was the only founding engineer left on the team and far too many mistakes by other people made it to my desk because I was the only person who could find them in review or track them down quickly in production. That was when I started hiring QA people.

Original discussionShould QA Exist150 source comments · at import
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OT

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, but in the end it makes a better, more resilient product.

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9W

> More importantly, it is almost impossible for engineers to be as well incentivized to spend extra time exploring edge cases in something they already believe to work than to ship a feature on time. Personal liability and professional insurance works for all the actual “professions” in the US, to some extent, right? It might be time to start the considerations for professional licensing for platform scale or commercially published software.

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MO

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.

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