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In my experience as a dev and now PM, there's a few issues with devs doing QA: 1) They are expensive. You can hire 3 or 4 QA people for every dev a lot of time

by larrik 6y ago

In my experience as a dev and now PM, there's a few issues with devs doing QA: 1) They are expensive. You can hire 3 or 4 QA people for every dev a lot of times. Why waste that money on devs? 2) They aren't that great at. They know how the program works, so most struggle to do things outside of the "happy path". I had a QA (actually my PM) paste in an entire book into a text field and break the site that way. Devs don't think of stuff like that. Another uses the browser's back button constantly, which none of the devs seem to do. That said, it doesn't excuse crappy code. If a code change/addition fails QA, that's on the Dev. However, if that failure hits Prod, that's on QA...

Jtsummers 6y ago
A problem that lead to (2): Developers aren't paid to test, the majority of their time is spent making new code because that's what management/customers want. Having one person have to wear 2+ hats doesn't work when they can never take one of the hats off. If they were legitimately given the amount of time to test as they get to code, your project could take twice as long, but it would be more thoroughly tested. And, likely, it wouldn't take twice as long because they'd actually have to think about testability and design earlier. And by "test" I do not mean just unit tests. Designing and implementing integration tests, assembling regression test suites, etc. Devs focused on just unit tests will never catch the errors that a dedicated V&V team can find.
dntrkv 6y ago
Once you assign QA to your devs, they will (should) figure out ways to automate as much as possible to reduce the burden that QA has on the team. In my experience, QA teams are usually starved of engineering resources, so a lot of things that can be automated are done manually or the automation is janky and constantly breaks. Once these issues are brought to the forefront, it becomes a priority to fix so that your expensive engineers aren't wasting time chasing bugs or fixing broken automation.
quadrifoliate 6y ago
> You can hire 3 or 4 QA people for every dev a lot of times. Why waste that money on devs? Attitudes like this will get you...not great QA. In my experience a sufficiently strong QA person can both cost and be worth more than adding another dev to the team.
wdb 6y ago
Personally, I think one QA person on dev team, which the dev can discuss test plans before writing code/tests is really useful. The QA person will always come up with test cases the dev wouldn't come up with and together you have a solid basis to start the work and write the appropriate tests. I really enjoyed working that way. The dev also learns over time what to consider when doing new work. Especially, when the QA is a subject matter expert (e.g. forex etc) and you not.

by larrik 6y ago

Jtsummers 6y ago

A problem that lead to (2): Developers aren't paid to test, the majority of their time is spent making new code because that's what management/customers want. Having one person have to wear 2+ hats doesn't work when they can never take one of the hats off. If they were legitimately given the amount of time to test as they get to code, your project could take twice as long, but it would be more thoroughly tested. And, likely, it wouldn't take twice as long because they'd actually have to think about testability and design earlier. And by "test" I do not mean just unit tests. Designing and implementing integration tests, assembling regression test suites, etc. Devs focused on just unit tests will never catch the errors that a dedicated V&V team can find.

dntrkv 6y ago

Once you assign QA to your devs, they will (should) figure out ways to automate as much as possible to reduce the burden that QA has on the team. In my experience, QA teams are usually starved of engineering resources, so a lot of things that can be automated are done manually or the automation is janky and constantly breaks. Once these issues are brought to the forefront, it becomes a priority to fix so that your expensive engineers aren't wasting time chasing bugs or fixing broken automation.

quadrifoliate 6y ago

> You can hire 3 or 4 QA people for every dev a lot of times. Why waste that money on devs? Attitudes like this will get you...not great QA. In my experience a sufficiently strong QA person can both cost and be worth more than adding another dev to the team.

wdb 6y ago

Personally, I think one QA person on dev team, which the dev can discuss test plans before writing code/tests is really useful. The QA person will always come up with test cases the dev wouldn't come up with and together you have a solid basis to start the work and write the appropriate tests. I really enjoyed working that way. The dev also learns over time what to consider when doing new work. Especially, when the QA is a subject matter expert (e.g. forex etc) and you not.