Google does a lot of test automation. I don't know if they do test-first or not but I heard that new-hire is given the "Working Effectively with Legacy Code", w

Google does a lot of test automation. I don't know if they do test-first or not but I heard that new-hire is given the "Working Effectively with Legacy Code", written by someone who works with Uncle Bob. At Google, there is a special role called Software Engineer in Test: they write tools to help developers debug performance issue, they also sit down with developers to help them to make their code more testable (this happened when you don't do test-first, sometime/once-in-a-while, developers will write code that's not easily testable via automation tests). Google is huge fans of code-review (probably that's why Andy Hertzfeld dislike Google). In contrast, Facebook probably doesn't do these practices (or did them in minimum). Facebook subscribes themselves to cowboy culture. Few days ago there were 2 posts in HN complaining about the Facebook API quality and documentation. I've used Facebook since 2006 and I do notice that their software is buggy whenever they push a newer build (you can tell: as soon as things degenerate, they just pushed the latest build). Aditya, who was the Director of Engineer back in 2008 (don't know if he's still), gave a talk recorded by InfoQ. He was asked about the state of unit-tests (or automation tests) and he said that the number of tests are minimum and not as many as he would've liked it to be. I know that some companies enforce Code-Review, TDD and CI: kaChing, IMVU. There are others (I think Disqus and Quora do that too, but I'm not sure to what extend) as well but they might not say it out-loud around here. The point is this: It doesn't matter what it calls (unit-tests, integration-tests, acceptance-tests), as long as you have extensive automated-tests, you can iterate faster and safer in the long-run. You can also deploy faster because you're quite sure nothing breaks. The old QA process no longer applies when people would write code and throw it over the wall to the QA and hope everything goes well (check Uncle Bob article about how we do QA is wrong).