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I was lucky enough to work in a small eng team with 1 full-time dedicated QA person. One of the very few coworkers from my long career that I have really tried

I was lucky enough to work in a small eng team with 1 full-time dedicated QA person. One of the very few coworkers from my long career that I have really tried hard to poach away from whatever they were doing after our shared workplace went bust. Yes, part of the job was to write and run manual test suites, and to sign off as the DRI that a certain version had had all the automated and manual tests pass before release. But their main value was in the completely vague mandate "get in there and try to break it." Having someone who knows the system and can really dig into the weak spots to find problems that devs will try to handwave away ("just one report of the problem? probably just some flaky browser extension") is so valuable. In my current job, I have tried for 5+ years to get leadership to agree to a FT QA function. No dice. "Developers should test their own code." Yeah and humans should stop polluting the ocean and using fossil fuels, how's that going?

ncphil 3y ago
"Developers should test their own code" is emblematic of a juvenile mindset in people who regularly fire up their "reality distortion field" to avoid the effort of educating themselves on their own operations (and that helps them deny responsibility when things go South). As W. Edwards Deming, bane of all "gut instinct" executives, once wrote, "The consumer is the most important part of the production line. Quality should be aimed at the needs of the consumer, present and future." The lack of a dedicated quality team shows a lack of respect for your customers. You know, the people you need to buy your products or services (unless you're intent on living off VC loans until you have to pull the ripcord on your golden parachute).