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We used to have a large QA silo at a previous job. They did exactly that. We broke that down that by moving the QA engineers into the respective product teams -
by tpmx 4y ago
We used to have a large QA silo at a previous job. They did exactly that. We broke that down that by moving the QA engineers into the respective product teams - and kept them, there.
Turns out many kinds of businesses/product teams (including Microsoft's Windows team, I'd say, from personal user experience) need dedicated QA people because many worthwhile tests can't really be automated well enough with a reasonable effort, or if they can, it's something that often breaks and needs regular maintenance.
I suspect that in the Windows case they simply stopped testing those troublesome cases.
- opportune 4y agoAgreed. QA is really helpful for anything UX/UIrelated (where the alternative is often experimentation, which really is only good for changing already existing things, and not necessarily ideal for new things). Or if something is so big, complex, and crusty like Windows, where it’d be a Sisyphean task to go back and add automated testing everywhere it could theoretically be useful, it’s a lot better as a stopgap than idealistically declaring you don’t need QA since in theory you could automate things (if you were willing to spend 2000 person-years on it).
- tpmx 4y agoIn case you're confused about the downvote(s): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32730380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32730380