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My wife has a freelance QA consultancy, and while I understand that there is often the sense that QA is a 'nag', I can honestly say that whenever she is involve
by bmelton 16y ago
My wife has a freelance QA consultancy, and while I understand that there is often the sense that QA is a 'nag', I can honestly say that whenever she is involved in my work, the quality of my output is much better, and takes less time to get it there.
A good QA analyst / team does much more than point at a problem and say 'there it is'. A good QA analyst can determine why you made an error, and can anticipate other errors you might have made in the same way. A good QA analyst will learn your formulae, learn your equations, understand your workflow and try to find root cause, even if they're not developers.
Having a good QA person with a trained eye for knowing what I'm likely to have overlooked is also FAR more cost effective than your high-paid developers doing the same task. If they know that 'heads will roll' when they get errors, I'm also betting that makes your releases even slower.
Off-topic completely, but I generally prefer non-developer QA analysts, as they generally prove themselves to 'think too much like me' to be effective.
- DanielRibeiro 16y agoPeople who know how to test are extremely valuable. Specially when doing peer review/pair programming with (solving the blind's eye thing) Testing as a whole is not an easy task as it involves testing some really hard things: memory leaks, performance, UX, correctness of parallel and distributed algorithms/programs/systems. However, Wealthfront engineers probably put this position more into perspective [1]: We do not have QA team and do not want to have one, the reasoning is that if a human is involved in testing then there is a higher chance of missing things and you simply can't test all the site dozens of times a day. Granted, Wealthfront uses continuous deployment[2], while still being regulated by the SEC. I really enjoy their lean startup approach to minimize inventory (ie: code not in production), while still keeping an immune system. And investors seem to agree it is really paying off [3]. [1] http://eng.wealthfront.com/2010/04/findbugs-husdon-and-pizza-driven.html http://eng.wealthfront.com/2010/04/findbugs-husdon-and-pizza... [2] http://www.eishay.com/2010/07/continuous-deployment-at-kaching.html http://www.eishay.com/2010/07/continuous-deployment-at-kachi... [3] http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/19/kaching-gets-100m-under-management-and-gets-all-wall-street-with-a-new-name/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/19/kaching-gets-100m-under-man...
- bmelton 16y agoAt least in my wife's case, she generally does pre-release QA, and doesn't necessarily do continuous QA. Still though, even if you need support for continuous deployment, you probably want a QA person to set up your automated test cases to test the output of a site in a way that, in my opinion, unit tests don't seem to catch.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- arosien 16y agoHaving worked in Silicon Valley for 12 years, I have yet to find QA people who could successfully automate testing in a non-fragile way or without using an expensive, proprietary and crappy testing harness. Those who know how to program are invariably better at writing automated tests. One recent CS graduate should be able to put a team of QA out of a job. (Disclosure: I work for Wealthfront)