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Looks like a pretty cool product. To play devil's advocate I'd like to poke holes at two things: Product team caring about quality: Devs need to balance qualit

Looks like a pretty cool product. To play devil's advocate I'd like to poke holes at two things: Product team caring about quality: Devs need to balance quality with speed, and feel appropriately ashamed when something breaks on prod. To the extent that devs optimise for speed, I don't see why product would be any different. The product team has a large backlog and many important deals blocked by certain features. The incentive to optimise for speed is just as strong. The tension you get between a dedicated QA team and a dev team arises precisely because the QA team cares _only_ about quality. So by moving the responsibility to product you'll either see more corner cutting due to product optimising for speed, or more tension due to product optimising for quality. I don't think you can have your cake and eat it too. Feasibility of no-code testing: having your browser interact with the page in the way you would like is a good fit for a no-code approach. But most of the effort in writing tests, I've found, is setting up the data (e.g. with factories or fixtures). I'm not so sure that you can no-code that side of QA as easily. If I'm right about that, it means product will end up dependent on devs to write the tests.

fredsters_s 5y ago
[author here] Both are solid points! Regarding the incentive structure, I think you're right - there's no way to eliminate the friction that comes from competing incentives. Our experience has been that empowering the product organization to make that tradeoff themselves leads to the optimal outcome for the business. The goal isn't to eliminate the tradeoff between speed and quality, but surface it, and put it in the hands of the people who are the business decision makers, which tends to be product. Re test data - we had seen this bottleneck with our previous product, which was purely about crowd testing. What we've seen since we shipped no code automation is that much of the data seeding by less mature teams can be done through the tests themselves. This is suboptimal, but with automation so cheap and fast, it works. Then over time the engineering team can seed the states that are most often created through the tests.

fredsters_s 5y ago

[author here] Both are solid points! Regarding the incentive structure, I think you're right - there's no way to eliminate the friction that comes from competing incentives. Our experience has been that empowering the product organization to make that tradeoff themselves leads to the optimal outcome for the business. The goal isn't to eliminate the tradeoff between speed and quality, but surface it, and put it in the hands of the people who are the business decision makers, which tends to be product. Re test data - we had seen this bottleneck with our previous product, which was purely about crowd testing. What we've seen since we shipped no code automation is that much of the data seeding by less mature teams can be done through the tests themselves. This is suboptimal, but with automation so cheap and fast, it works. Then over time the engineering team can seed the states that are most often created through the tests.