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yes, because as we know; SWEs are shit at proper testing. A good QA department will know what the software does, but more importantly how it should behave, and

yes, because as we know; SWEs are shit at proper testing. A good QA department will know what the software does, but more importantly how it should behave, and how its changed over time. They should be a good resource for working out how a feature should look and behave. a good QA department is worth its weight in gold

drewcoo 4y ago
> because as we know; SWEs are shit at proper testing Not true. There's nothing magical about testers. They don't have "special" skills or deep voodoo powers. The best ones are just smart people who understand people and software. > They should be a good resource for working out how a feature should look and behave You must have weak designers and PMs. Everyone should be welcome in the process, but those people drive that stuff.
- tremon 4y ago
  There's nothing magical about testers Oh, but there is: they have fault-finding in their job description.
- hinkley 4y ago
  I have worked with a wider range of QA folk than you have, apparently. The best are magic, the worst are leaches. And I think that’s the problem with QA. Those who don’t like it cherry-pick their examples. The thing to remember is that getting rid of QA upsets a triumvirate power dynamic. If it’s the dev team versus project management, the dev team always loses. If it’s sometimes dev and QA against PM, then you can win those fights. But only if you haven’t removed the QA manager from the org chart. We’ve played ourselves in essentially a union-busting manner. If you’ve always been at loggerheads with the QA team, I can tell you that you’ve been missing out. Looking back, defusing the default animosity between QA and Dev has gotten me more promotions than anything else in my career, and the lack of a QA team has put a substantial damper on my upward mobility. It sucks and I really wish we could go back.
- dijit 4y ago
  > They don't have "special" skills or deep voodoo powers. Some do, seriously. I'm coloured by video games, but some of the QA people I've seen are magic, without them entire products wouldn't ship at all. There's something to be said for having "break shit and report on how you did it" as a job title, regardless of the other gains you get for having someone who holistically understands the product. Some are even lazy, so work to automate themselves out of working, which makes their impact much wider, even when it's domain specific. It's also the case that the people coming out of QA in gamedev and going into other parts of the company tend to do extremely well compared to people going direct into that area. Our old managing director started in QA, as did the executive producer.
- tkiolp4 4y ago
  > There's nothing magical about testers Yes, there is: they get to do testing full-time. Engineers spend their best “brain time” designing and writing systems. Testers spend their best brain time, well, testing. That can make a huge difference when it comes to find bugs.
- KaiserPro 4y ago
  > There's nothing magical about testers There is a spectrum, of course. But, a good QA has a "feeling" for finding where things break, an excellent QA know how to fix it. Just as writing software is a skill, so is QA'ing along with Sysadmining.
xmodem 4y ago
Having worked in orgs both with and without a QA function, they can serve a very important counter-balancing function to an overly aggressive product org, that is determined to ship the features that'll make their growth metrics at any cost. (This is the more modern version of QA, of course, where it stands for Quality Advocate or Quality Assistance)
pphysch 4y ago
"Proper testing" is often introduced, in CS courses, as 100% Test Coverage cargo cultism. Which is really a error-prone and unproductive way of ensuring Correctness in the software beyond the guarantees offered by the programming language. Most SW orgs should not waste time on test coverage metrics. On the other hand, we can look at SW testing as "building a robotic user that will catch errors before real users". This approach is far more intellectually-engaging, productive and gets SWEs in touch with the product. That is to say, SWEs aren't shit at "testing", they are shit at product, because product is virtually omitted in traditional CS curricula.
- pm90 4y ago
  I do think theres still a lot of value in having close to 100% test coverage. As you point out its not sufficient to prevent issues, but having code run somewhere at least once before running in production is good.
  - thfuran 4y ago
    I'd much prefer 100% specs coverage to 100% code coverage.
tkiolp4 4y ago
Before: software engineers wrote code. Now: they write code, they test it, they understand customer’s requirements, they monitor their code, they are on-call, they mentor others, they challenge the status quo, they give tech talks, sometimes they attend company hackatons… I’m tired of software engineers having to do a bit of everything.
- AdrianB1 4y ago
  "What is DevOps?"
- dilyevsky 4y ago
  You can always go an pick up a jr dev job at a bank somewhere. Either that or become hyperspecialized in a very complicated technology. Otherwise yeah your job is solving business problems not writing code

drewcoo 4y ago

> because as we know; SWEs are shit at proper testing Not true. There's nothing magical about testers. They don't have "special" skills or deep voodoo powers. The best ones are just smart people who understand people and software. > They should be a good resource for working out how a feature should look and behave You must have weak designers and PMs. Everyone should be welcome in the process, but those people drive that stuff.

tremon 4y ago
There's nothing magical about testers Oh, but there is: they have fault-finding in their job description.
hinkley 4y ago
I have worked with a wider range of QA folk than you have, apparently. The best are magic, the worst are leaches. And I think that’s the problem with QA. Those who don’t like it cherry-pick their examples. The thing to remember is that getting rid of QA upsets a triumvirate power dynamic. If it’s the dev team versus project management, the dev team always loses. If it’s sometimes dev and QA against PM, then you can win those fights. But only if you haven’t removed the QA manager from the org chart. We’ve played ourselves in essentially a union-busting manner. If you’ve always been at loggerheads with the QA team, I can tell you that you’ve been missing out. Looking back, defusing the default animosity between QA and Dev has gotten me more promotions than anything else in my career, and the lack of a QA team has put a substantial damper on my upward mobility. It sucks and I really wish we could go back.
dijit 4y ago
> They don't have "special" skills or deep voodoo powers. Some do, seriously. I'm coloured by video games, but some of the QA people I've seen are magic, without them entire products wouldn't ship at all. There's something to be said for having "break shit and report on how you did it" as a job title, regardless of the other gains you get for having someone who holistically understands the product. Some are even lazy, so work to automate themselves out of working, which makes their impact much wider, even when it's domain specific. It's also the case that the people coming out of QA in gamedev and going into other parts of the company tend to do extremely well compared to people going direct into that area. Our old managing director started in QA, as did the executive producer.
tkiolp4 4y ago
> There's nothing magical about testers Yes, there is: they get to do testing full-time. Engineers spend their best “brain time” designing and writing systems. Testers spend their best brain time, well, testing. That can make a huge difference when it comes to find bugs.
KaiserPro 4y ago
> There's nothing magical about testers There is a spectrum, of course. But, a good QA has a "feeling" for finding where things break, an excellent QA know how to fix it. Just as writing software is a skill, so is QA'ing along with Sysadmining.

xmodem 4y ago

Having worked in orgs both with and without a QA function, they can serve a very important counter-balancing function to an overly aggressive product org, that is determined to ship the features that'll make their growth metrics at any cost. (This is the more modern version of QA, of course, where it stands for Quality Advocate or Quality Assistance)

pphysch 4y ago

"Proper testing" is often introduced, in CS courses, as 100% Test Coverage cargo cultism. Which is really a error-prone and unproductive way of ensuring Correctness in the software beyond the guarantees offered by the programming language. Most SW orgs should not waste time on test coverage metrics. On the other hand, we can look at SW testing as "building a robotic user that will catch errors before real users". This approach is far more intellectually-engaging, productive and gets SWEs in touch with the product. That is to say, SWEs aren't shit at "testing", they are shit at product, because product is virtually omitted in traditional CS curricula.

pm90 4y ago
I do think theres still a lot of value in having close to 100% test coverage. As you point out its not sufficient to prevent issues, but having code run somewhere at least once before running in production is good.
- thfuran 4y ago
  I'd much prefer 100% specs coverage to 100% code coverage.

tkiolp4 4y ago

Before: software engineers wrote code. Now: they write code, they test it, they understand customer’s requirements, they monitor their code, they are on-call, they mentor others, they challenge the status quo, they give tech talks, sometimes they attend company hackatons… I’m tired of software engineers having to do a bit of everything.

AdrianB1 4y ago
"What is DevOps?"
dilyevsky 4y ago
You can always go an pick up a jr dev job at a bank somewhere. Either that or become hyperspecialized in a very complicated technology. Otherwise yeah your job is solving business problems not writing code