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As someone who also needs to explain the importance and nuance of QA engineering to my startup partners, do you have any go-to resources you use to describe/sel

by btown 7y ago

As someone who also needs to explain the importance and nuance of QA engineering to my startup partners, do you have any go-to resources you use to describe/sell the position? Genuinely want to expand my ability to speak to the role.

wenc 7y ago
Genuinely curious, are there a set of a disciplines a software QA engineers has to have? What tools do they use? (I only know they do software testing, but this could mean a lot of different things) I understand what Devops (a similarly amorphous term) people do, but I've never had a clear picture of what the day-to-day life of a QA engineer would look like.
eden_hazard 7y ago
Point them to situations like this. Maybe small e-commerce sites can get away with it but financial and health tech companies should always double, triple, check everything. Move fast and break things is fine for new startups but once you have a significant amount of users, the reliability of the product should be the main source of pride for the company. I know not every company needs it. I was the second QA engineer at a food-tech startup in Boston 5 years back. QA got laid off after 10 months but they are still successful without QA right now. They hire great devs and have a great process. At the end of the day, if the site stops working, people will just get some late food deliveries. One the other hand, I've a friend working at Ford in Michigan and he says they have no code. You have hundreds of engineers and everyone manually tests their own code. He says sometimes he will test for a couple of minutes and just push his code. I don't blame him. Devs are great at writing code. Let them write code but have someone else test their code please. I've a small options position open on Robhinhood. I'm not too worried about it but I imagine some people have tens and hundreds of thousands. I've read some rumors that this outage was caused by the leap year timing and it happened 4 years ago too. This is just unacceptable.

by btown 7y ago

wenc 7y ago

Genuinely curious, are there a set of a disciplines a software QA engineers has to have? What tools do they use? (I only know they do software testing, but this could mean a lot of different things) I understand what Devops (a similarly amorphous term) people do, but I've never had a clear picture of what the day-to-day life of a QA engineer would look like.

eden_hazard 7y ago

Point them to situations like this. Maybe small e-commerce sites can get away with it but financial and health tech companies should always double, triple, check everything. Move fast and break things is fine for new startups but once you have a significant amount of users, the reliability of the product should be the main source of pride for the company. I know not every company needs it. I was the second QA engineer at a food-tech startup in Boston 5 years back. QA got laid off after 10 months but they are still successful without QA right now. They hire great devs and have a great process. At the end of the day, if the site stops working, people will just get some late food deliveries. One the other hand, I've a friend working at Ford in Michigan and he says they have no code. You have hundreds of engineers and everyone manually tests their own code. He says sometimes he will test for a couple of minutes and just push his code. I don't blame him. Devs are great at writing code. Let them write code but have someone else test their code please. I've a small options position open on Robhinhood. I'm not too worried about it but I imagine some people have tens and hundreds of thousands. I've read some rumors that this outage was caused by the leap year timing and it happened 4 years ago too. This is just unacceptable.