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I don't think it's that cut and dry. I've worked in some places where the QA team was useless, meaningless red tape to get your stuff deployed. They wouldn't do

by mstade 11y ago

I don't think it's that cut and dry. I've worked in some places where the QA team was useless, meaningless red tape to get your stuff deployed. They wouldn't do much but sign off on deployment at some point, yet bore no responsibility if shit hit the fan. In these cases, they really were just an unnecessary cost and you learned pretty quickly to make sure your tests were in place, that you were testing for the right things, and so on. But then there were the other QA teams. The people that would just reject your stuff outright if it didn't have tests (no matter if it worked) and when the tests passed they would look at things truly from a customer perspective. They would ask really uncomfortable questions, not just to developers, but to designers and business alike. They had a mindset that was different from those creating things; they were the devil's advocate. These people did much, much more good than harm, and they are few and far between. Unfortunately, while I believe they were incredibly valuable, business thought otherwise when cuts came around..

csours 11y ago
When testing, you are the headlights of the project. ... Testing is done to find information. Critical decisions about the project or the product are made on the basis of that information." [1] I recently became a software tester, and I really didn't understand the role for quite a while. Is my primary responsibility finding bugs? Logging defects? Analysing requirements documents? Writing test scripts? Writing Status reports? Answer: Do enough of each to fulfill your goal of gathering and sharing information with your management and dev groups. If the software tester has problems testing, then the customer will have problems using it, and the company will have problems supporting it. 1. Kaner, Cem; James Bach; and Bret Pettichord. 2001. Lessons Learned in Software Testing. Wiley.
- bboreham 11y ago
  The goal of a QA person should be "shipping great software".
  - csours 11y ago
    I agree that's the goal, but what is the role? What are the contributions that QA provide? That's what I had problems understanding.
jaggederest 11y ago
I think the key difference is an engineering mindset. When you have software developers skilled in quality assurance who have the job of finding the edge cases and producing comprehensive additional acceptance and functional testing, they're an asset. It's a particular perverse mindset that I personally really enjoy interacting with as a software developer 'customer' - those evil bastards find the best bugs, regression test them, and expand to find all of that class of error in the application.

by mstade 11y ago

csours 11y ago

When testing, you are the headlights of the project. ... Testing is done to find information. Critical decisions about the project or the product are made on the basis of that information." [1] I recently became a software tester, and I really didn't understand the role for quite a while. Is my primary responsibility finding bugs? Logging defects? Analysing requirements documents? Writing test scripts? Writing Status reports? Answer: Do enough of each to fulfill your goal of gathering and sharing information with your management and dev groups. If the software tester has problems testing, then the customer will have problems using it, and the company will have problems supporting it. 1. Kaner, Cem; James Bach; and Bret Pettichord. 2001. Lessons Learned in Software Testing. Wiley.

bboreham 11y ago
The goal of a QA person should be "shipping great software".
- csours 11y ago
  I agree that's the goal, but what is the role? What are the contributions that QA provide? That's what I had problems understanding.

jaggederest 11y ago

I think the key difference is an engineering mindset. When you have software developers skilled in quality assurance who have the job of finding the edge cases and producing comprehensive additional acceptance and functional testing, they're an asset. It's a particular perverse mindset that I personally really enjoy interacting with as a software developer 'customer' - those evil bastards find the best bugs, regression test them, and expand to find all of that class of error in the application.