More importantly, it is almost impossible for engineers to be as well incentivized to spend extra time exploring edge cases in something they already believe to work than to ship a feature on time.
Like everything else though, its contextual. Complexity of domain, surface area and age of product, depth of experience on team and consequences of failure are all so variable that there cannot be only one answer.
I have done it both ways for many years. I have worked on teams where QA is a frustrating nuisance, and teams where they were critical to success. I have worked on teams that did pretty good without them, and probably those were the highest throughput, most productive teams because the engineers were forced to own all the consequences - every bug they shipped was a production issue they were immediately forced to track down and resolve.
But those were very small teams, and eventually I was the only founding engineer left on the team and far too many mistakes by other people made it to my desk because I was the only person who could find them in review or track them down quickly in production. That was when I started hiring QA people.
Usually there either arent any in which case bugs get missed or there are 5 very cheap ones running mindless scripts who are standing in for the devs' inability or unwillingness to write decent automated tests but dont catch the really deep level thorny stuff.
Personal liability and professional insurance works for all the actual “professions” in the US, to some extent, right?
It might be time to start the considerations for professional licensing for platform scale or commercially published software.
When I got started in software, QA was already in a heavy decline. A mentor who had been a QA manager at Apple told me that being a QA person (in the industry) was once seen as a high-trust position. He was sad at what it became.
Their approach to QA was to have this be a optional thing the service people could do.
It worked surprisingly well, with the caveat that they never created regression tests.
The employer eventually switched someone from that team to establish these regression tests full time, but they had no programming experience and by the time I left no real progress was done in around 6 month. No idea what came of that, and a few years later they fired a lot of the team
But there is also bad QA: The most worthless QA I was forced to work with, was an external company, where I, as developer, had to write the test sheet and they just tested that. Obviously they could not find bugs as I tested everything on the sheet.
My most impressive QA experience where when I helped out a famous Japanese gaming company. They tested things like press multiple buttons in the same frame and see my code crash.
This was my sole experience at the one place I worked with an internal QA team. They absolutely could never find bugs that devs missed, often mis-marked ones that didn't exist, and failed to find obvious edge cases that did exist.
Multiple devs fired because the CEO believed the QA over the engineering team; if they marked a bug as present, it was the engineer's fault for writing it. If they didn't catch a bug that made it to prod, it was the engineer's fault for not including it in the test plan. They represented nothing but red tape and provided no value.
Good QA sounds great! I'd love to know what that's like someday! It'd be great to have someone testing my code and finding breakages I missed! I'm only slightly (incredibly) bitter about my bad experience with its implementation.
This is an area where I expect AI to create a bimodal future. The smaller group of high quality QA people will now be able to offload the activity to agents instead of the QA drones. They'll still be worth their weight in gold, whereas the drones will be redundant.
The latter is much more high touch, but they're often worth their weight in gold. The former is kinda pointless.
Moreover, the best QAs would almost always try to be not QA - to shift into a better respected and better paid field.
I wish it werent so (hence my username) but there is a definite class divide between devs and QA and it shows up not just in terms of the pay packets but also who gets the boot in down times and who gets listened to. This definitely affects the quality of people.
I think it's overdue an overhaul much like the sysadmin->devops transition.
This might have been an Apple/MS thing, but we always had very technical QA people on the dev tools team. For example, the QA lead for the C++ compiler had written their own compiler from scratch and was an amazing contributor.
> Moreover, the best QAs would almost always try to be not QA - to shift into a better respected and better paid field.
That sort of seems circular. If they're not respected or paid well, of course most of the talented people would not want to remain in QA, and eventually you'd just have mediocre QA. That doesn't really give you any insight into whether high quality QA would be useful though.
(edit: I see now that's basically the point you're trying to make, so I guess we're in agreement)
But yea, so many companies cheap their QA and then wonders why their QA sucks.
> They don’t always make me happy (in the moment) with their bugs or with how they decide to break the software, but in the end it makes a better, more resilient product.
I think the core of the issue is the weasel word "Good QA" instead of just "QA". You're underlining the importance of having someone in a team who has good product understanding and has good ownership skills. How many QAs fit that description? Not many, unfortunately. Some FANGs outright eliminated the role and replaced it with a mix of product owners and team ownership, and some QAs are just doing their 9-to-5 job going through their manual test scripts to verify it something meets a definition of done. What happens when you can have a LLM agent doing the same instantly as a step in a random CICD pipeline?
This is a big asset in the current paradigm where a LLM agent can effectively implement behavior only when given a robust test suite to iterate against.
I don’t understand the reasoning here why QA shouldn’t be engineering.
Who watches the watcher, right?
That aside, the core idea is the same as the principles of independent audit, peer review, or even simply just specialization.
Red team / Blue team?
It's not a protected term in the US so it's jarring to those of us living where it is.
This is funny.
What I have seen before with QA is a queue like system. Hand to QA. get back in 3 days. Not the QA persons fault. It is the setup if the org that is wrong.
Imagine if you had a code review role and code review team and you had to wait to get your code OKed. We wouldn't put up with it.
QA teams seperate from Eng worked when the software was burned to CD rather than uploaded to s3.
- QA is always the first thing companies outsource, with predictable results
- Companies either go the route or “separate QA org with separate management chain” or “have QA engineers report to dev managers”. I’ve seen serious misaligned incentives and toxic outcomes with both
- Frequent Slack messages at 4:15 PM on Friday - “hey they just merged the PR, we really need it tested before Monday stand up”
- QA becomes a de facto dumping ground for glue work that other teams don’t want to do. Senior QA ends up morphing into a de facto “responsibility without authority” project manager role
- There is zero internet “community” around QA the way there is for developers or designers. There is no Slashdot or Hacker News for QA and there never will be. Just a bazaar of book authors and consultants promoting themselves on LinkedIn
IMO the only thing that makes sense anymore is having good SDETs embedded in engineering teams.
This rings so many bells that it feels like some Buddhist festival. Apply the same approach to QA, Operations, and anything outside the actual product development: when this arrogance was shared between bosses and developers, all good on their side. Now with the AI, the arrogance is staying only on the bosses' side, and we have developers freaking out.
But I've worked at places with a whole spectrum of coverage in roles spanning Product Mgrs, Project Mgrs, BAs, QAs, production support level 1, production support level 2, etc. The one constant is whatever is missing or understaffed just ends up getting done by engineers.
Testing, on-call, Jira managing, requirements gathering with users, analysis, etc... all falls on to engineering. Then management gets even more wound up about dev productivity/velocity, etc.
Can I do your job? Yep. Can I also, at the same time, be the engineer that optimizes the IT systems? No - one of these jobs will suffer.
Give me the chance to understand your job, and I’ll replace as much of it as possible with code to do the same thing. But what it won’t do is have good judgement. It will make decisions on actual data - accurate data, erroneous data, it doesn’t care.
I think this is an interesting place to put “AI” - can it take input in the form of data and historical decisions, and come to a new decision from recent data? The same decision a human would?
1. Quality management is a continuous process that starts with product discovery and business requirements. Developers often assume that requirements are clear and move on to building the happy path. QA often explore requirements in depth and ask a lot of good questions.
2. QA usually have the best knowledge of the product and help product managers to understand its current behavior, when new requirements suggest to change it.
3. The same applies to product design. Good designer never leaves the team with a few annotated screens, supporting developers until the product is shipped. Design QA - the verification of conformance of implementation to design specs - can be done with QA team, which can assist with automation of design-specific tests.
4. Customer support - QA people are natural partners of customer support organization, with their knowledge of the product, existing bugs and workarounds.
And just a story: on one of my previous jobs recently hired QA engineer spotted number error in an All Hands presentation. That was an immediate buy-in from founders. :)
Any process in an organization of size will have indicators that measure output. Those indicators should typically be paired with indicators that measure the quality of the output, to ensure product or service levels. That's the theory, and the genesis of 'quality management': whether you're measuring output code or breakfasts [1] or chemicals or widgets or medicine, you need to measure the quality of the output if there are any client specifications or expectations around the output. And there are very few cases where your customers will not have any specs or expectations around your product or service.
How you manage quality follows from those basics; it matters where you measure quality but it is so process dependent - earlier in the process lowers costs, but may not suffice to guarantee final quality - that quality management has to be designed around the specific process; balancing cost with benefit and requirements. How deep or specialized quality management becomes depends on the needs of the org, the size of the org, and the needs of the particular process.
This is why I'm skeptical about whether broad articles like this are beneficial overall. Why and how matter, and where's the foundational discussion behind why and how? Do folks not think at the organizational/business level? Maybe not everyone is a Sheryl Sandberg :-)
1. If you don't have Quality Assurance, then you have Quality Uncertainty.
2. QA is a full time job. If you offload the responsibility of QA to the engineers, then you're giving them 2 full time jobs. So unless they're working 16 hours days (even if they are tbh), you aren't assuring quality, you're compromising it.
Except I worked at a company with a QA department made up of entirely "Automated Verification Engineers" ... over a decade ago. And the head of the department had taught at a local QA school (so presumably other QA engineers learned that style of work from her also).
Good QA departments switched to this mode long before AI was even a thing! Maybe 90+% of QA departments didn't work that way pre-AI, but there certainly were ones that did!
A great QA can understand the features of a product quickly, turn those concepts into some sort of grid or matrix in their mind, then pull a bunch of paths and scenarios with estimated priorities and probabilities at a fast and efficient pace, all with great coverage. They can also identify features contradicting each other more quickly than product people.
I think a good QA is capable of being a great vibe coder nowadays, too. If you can write great test suites (write names only), agents nowadays are able to turn those specs into decent codebases. Comparatively, I know a lot of decent dev having not very good taste in testing, who often write overlapping tests or missing important paths.
It's terrifying without that support. The beancounter level mgt does not Get It that it's cheaper to have this kind of support now than much later in the product cycle.
If engineering owns quality, then engineering own all, up the chain. No need for anything and anybody.
Which is the AI pipe dream, really.
You are, in fact, with using AI, QA or coding or otherwise, externalizing services in hope the services will improve and costs will drop.
Let me know how that goes without HITLs.
That would put the damper on the pipe dream pretty quick. Probably more healthily than any data center ban could ever do.
If engineers were licensed, bonded, and liable, things would go very differently.
* speaking as having been a practicing software “engineer” for a decade
But since CEOs, or any other bosses, need to make a living, they will eat the liability in exchange for wealth, and leave engineering in the dust.
I think the same patterns can be applied here.
Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality ...
:-)
This was painful at first but I do think it's the way to go. We found that too much manual QA incentivizes devs writing features to throw it over the fence - why should they test more if someone else is paid to do it? Devs need to feel the pain of writing tests if their code is hard to test, and they need to be held accountable when their code blows up in production. This feedback loop is valuable in the long run.
Same thing for test automation. Previously we shipped this over to our in-team DevOps people and they built complicated CI/CD setups. Losing them meant we needed to simplify our stack. Took a while and it slowed down feature development, but it was worth it. Of course you need leadership who understands this and dedicates time to building this out.
In defense of DevOps, I think the landscape for automation was poor a few years back. Jenkins and Teamcity are way too complex. Github Actions (for all its warts, and there are many) is much simpler. Our pipelines are also in their own CI/CD (CDK, CodeBuild) - infrastructure as code is the key to scaling.
We still have manual QA people to test things we can't automate. Usually this is for weird surfaces such as smart TVs, or for perceptual tests. I don't see this going away any time soon, but high levels of automation elsewhere drive down the need for "catch-all" manual testing.
What I find works best is when the Product Manager, Developer Lead, and QA Lead collaborate on requirements. The Product Manager designs the feature, the Developer focuses on technical design and architecture, and the QA Lead maps out user scenarios, integration points, and edge cases. Together, they define the requirements that constitute a successful feature.
When QA is involved early in the process, they understand and drive exactly how the feature should behave. This ensures that critical cases are considered and potential risks are handled before a single line of code is written.
I've been places where devs have no idea what the product-as a whole-does. They just work on the feature of the sprint and throw the code over the wall. Their testing consists of if: it compiled==it passed. They have no idea how to even start actually testing if it's not on the happy path.
I been in places where the code accomplished the spec, but in the most lazy way possible so it appeared to work but was useless outside of what the tests looked for.
I knew one QA guy that was amazing but was so overloaded because management kept hiring "cheap" QA that were actively making his life worse.
I'm a tech writer right now at a tech company and a dev just sent over an LLM generated "doc" that's referring to things that don't exist.
Neither management nor dev has learned anything from Therac-25. QA is hard.
I often find that devs who think otherwise have never had to ship anything against a drop dead date, or definitively prove that a supplier has not met a contractual obligation (after the normal engineers have found it to be their problem in the first place).
Most importantly, they have the diligence and patience to methodically test subtly different cases, which I frankly don't have.
On the question of whether QA slows things down, I have to ask: slows down what? Slows down releasing something broken? Why is that something to optimize for? We should always be asking how long it takes to release the right thing (indeed I'm most productive when I can close a ticket after concluding nothing is needed).
Quality is something that takes dedicated focus and lots of work. Therefore it’s a job, not an afterthought or latest priority for someone whose primary focus is not quality.
QA perspective and focus is just different from the one of the team building the thing. It's precisely because of their detached perspective that they can do their work properly.
But on other hand those people can not often be trusted. As such you need a team that does checks again. Or alternatively they might have misunderstood something and thus produced incorrect system. Or there is some other fault in their thought process or reality. And system operates differently in more real scenario.
Test automation is not same coding that developers do. I don’t mean from quality point but they have completely different set of things that matter. Unlike writer here may think while it is important to have tests that pass or fail fast the performance is not one of the most important characteristics. You see tests are run less often than the code and not all tests need to run every time or even every day. One of the most important characteristics of a good test is something developers easily overlook. It is maintainability. When code is written then it’s tested and then it sits in codebase until refactored. Tests don’t get this. Tests work on environment that is under constant change (especially in shift left) that makes maintainability and abstraction layers much more important with test automation code than with developing a feature.
Something to note that some developers do not understand testing at all. They may think it’s all about getting tests passed or getting software broken. It’s not either of those. It’s just checking that software works like expected in different scenarios.
Because of those two things: code maintainability and (mis)understanding testing in deeper level, some developers do great tests and enjoy good qa as resulting product gets better. And then there are developers that struggle with all of that and usually with their developing as well.
1. define a requirement 2. implement the requirement 3. verify that the requirement was implemented
TDD was built around the idea that 1 and 3 could be unified in automated testing, and that's certainly true for a large part of it. But QA as a discrete role needs to exist because, beyond verifying that 2 was done correctly, they expose higher level bugs in 1, the requirements themselves.
It's virtually impossible to define requirements completely and without second order interactions that cause problems. QA is as effective at exposing assumptions and handwaving by the people who created the wireframes or the visual design as by the developers failing to test their own work.
And ideally, this leads to the cycle being virtuous: higher quality starts at the requirements phase, not the implentation phase. It's not just that QA should work closely with the engineers--the engineers need to work closely with UX and VD to ensure they fully understand the requirements. The incentives are aligned among all parties.
I worked with a QA team for the last fifteen years until last year when they laid them all off.
QA is a discrete skill in and of itself. I have never met a dev truly qualified to do QA. If you don't think this you have never worked with a good QA person. A good QA persons super power is finding weird broken interactions between features and layers where they meet. Things you would never think of in a million years. Any dingbat can test input validation, but it takes a truly talented person to ask "what if I did X in one tab, Y in another, and then Z, all with this exact timing so events overlap". I have been truly stunned at some of the issues QA has found in the past.
As for time, they saved us so much time! Unless your goal is to not test at all and push slop, they are taking so much work off your plate!
Beyond feature testing, when a customer defect would come in they would use their expertise to validate it, reproduce it, document the parameters and boundaries of the issue before it ever got passed on to dev. Now all that work is on us.
As a QA: this bug will get downprioritised by PM to oblivion.
I kid a little, I worked with some very good PMs when we did client work who made my life much easier. Working on a SaaS though, I find them generally less than useful.
If it messes up the UI until you refresh, yeah, I understand deprioritizing that.
If it causes catastrophic data corruption or leaks admin credentials, any sane PM would want that fixed ASAP.
where I work it is normally easier to fix things than deprioritize to oblivion. I can fix an issue, but priority puts a dozen people in a meeting.
That being said, QA is definitely an important aspect of software development - regardless of who owns this work. Imo, instead of having a QA engineer per team or a few teams, you should have a QA shape role (similar to AVE you mentioned) that oversees a large area like an Org and pushes hard to make sure quality standards are held high across teams.
It's also trivial for engineers these days to have great e2e automated test coverage with AI. We're actually building getlark.ai that helps engineers with this.
Anything that involves gating bits of code, basically, and deciding whether to gate bits of code or not.
But it isn't? Finding and fixing are the major time sinks?
> You’re creating bad behavior for your engineers by not having them responsible for their quality.
What prevents you from maintaining responsibility if QA finds the bug? The thing you're throwing over is the investigation/finding, it doesn't follow that you should absolve the throwers
QA should not be forced into an engineering or automation track because the incentives are wrong. You end up with test code becoming the goal and then it usually rots due to most QA not having the experience to create a codebase that scales.
I don't think the industry today understands how to treat QA and I think that leads to a lot of assumptions that it's not useful.
That sure is a sequence of words.
It comes across to me like the emphasized part is arguing against what it's supposed to be arguing for.
Or is the premise that the developers somehow can't run the AI verifier?
I would ask anyone that thinks QA is unnecessary to spend a few days on an actual aerospace production line. Software and hardware get EXCESSIVE QA. For good reason.
Not even mentioning the potential regulatory/market and legal consequences if you don't.
We then got bought out and new management put in. They siloed QA and made it impossible for us to even talk to them about what we were doing. Within a year, we had one deployment fail four times in a row and went from favorite vendor to "utter trash vendor we can't get rid of." Our QA engineer quit, as well as the rest of the team (I was the last to leave). I'm still surprised they still have that customer.
[1] We were the only team having to deal with SS7. It wasn't easy hiring programmers for it, and I think at the highest head count, we had like five members (including the manager when we had one [2], but not including QA, which was "officially" never a part of our team).
[2] If it was tough hiring programmers to deal with SS7, it was even harder to hire managers to deal with programmers dealing with SS7. I think for half the time I was there (over 10 years) I had no official manager and reported to a director or higher in the company.
Should Legal exist?
Should Facilities exist?
Surely your average employee could own each of these functions.
I’d like them to record their steps in details in videos and have AI dissected the steps into text descriptor that’s relevant to the code.
The moment that happens it will either be re-outsourced to QA anyways or quality will become a question of licensing and bonding of professional engineers
Unit tests are very expensive and return little value. Conversely, a (manual?) 'smoke test' is very cheap and returns great value - the first thing you do when updating a server for example is to check it still responds (and nothing has gone wrong in the deployment process), takes 2 seconds to do, prevents highly embarrassing downtime due to a misconfigured docker pull or whatever.
Why are unit tests very expensive? This goes against everything I know.
Then there is the danger of thinking that green=all good, an example of 'automation bias' where we learn to trust the automation even as things go wrong.
As makers, it is also tempting to believe that [all] problems can be solved by making something (i.e. code), but actually many problems are not of that nature, and cannot be solved in that way.
At the same time, many quality attributes can't really be automatically tested, so automation shouldn't try to replace manual testing, it should be used to augment it.
Also, I worked tech support for a number of years and I've watched all kinds of unexpected ways that people would interact with their devices. I always did all the weird stuff that most of us wouldn't consider when operating software:
"Why would someone drag every file to the desktop before they opened them?"
"I don't know, but I saw someone who always did that so I tried it."
Enterprise software companies selling definitely need it. Customers ask was this tested? where is the test report?
The testing pyramid is a par excellance SWE kool-aid. Someone wrote a logically-sounding blogpost about it many years ago and then people started regurgitating it without any empirical evidence behind it.
Many of us have realised that you need a "testing hourglass", not a "testing pyramid". Unit tests are universally considered useful, there's not much debate about it (also they're cheap). Integration tests are expensive and, in most cases, have very limited use. UI and API tests are extremely useful because they are testing whether the system behaves as we expect it to behave.
E.g. for a specific system of ours we have ~30k unit tests and ~10k UI/API tests. UI and API tests are effectively the living, valid documentation of how the system behaves. Those tests are what prevent the system becoming 'legacy'. UI and API tests are what enable large-scale refactors without breaking stuff.
Isolated QA should not exist because anything a QA engineer can do manually can be automated.
the vertical axis is not test type. It is would you run the test. At the bottom are deterministic fast tests for something completely unrelated to what you are working on - but they are so easy/fast you run them anyway 'just in case'. As you move up you get tests that you more and more want to aviod running. Tests that take a long time, tests that randomly fail when nothing is wrong, tests that need some settup, tests that need some expensive license (i can't think of more now but I'm sure there are).
You want to drive everything down as far as possible, but there is value in tests that are higher so you won't get rid of it. Just remember as soon you get to the 'make would run this test but I'm skipping it for now because it is annoying' line you need a seperate process to ensure the test is eventually run - you are trading off speed now for the risk that the test will find something and it is 10x harder to fix when you get there - when a test is run all the time you know what caused the failure and can go right there, while later means you did several things and have forgotten details. 10x is an estimate, depending where in your process you put it it could be 100 or even 1000 times harder.
I almost entirely agree. You'd certainly want a majority of QA responsibilities to fall to devs since that keeps the feedback loop tight. Also with the amount of compute we have you can trivially outpace a typical QA team with a single dev working on fuzz tests and property based tests. If you really still feel the need to outsource then there are cool tools like Antithesis [1] which let you trade money for compute in their complicated fuzz testing suite.
Where that falls apart imo is when your software interacts with hardware in any non-trivial way. Fuzz testing doesn't really work when your system is spinning big and heavy things for example. Real hardware that interacts with the world will always create this gap where the devs don't know how to fully test it. Your systems engineers are best equipped to handle this and ensure certain controls follow the right curves, but they typically don't have the bandwidth or are very inexperienced with software. I think a QA organization _can_ fill this gap and deliver value. But I'd almost always prefer hiring another 1 or 2 system engineers who can work towards this problem full time instead. It's much easier to train someone in software than it is to train them in motor control or sealed systems.
I’ve had quite a bit of success in helping my dev teams to own quality, devising and writing their own test cases, maintaining test pipelines, running bug hunts, etc. 90% of this can be attributed to treating developers as my customer, for whom I build software products which allow them to be more productive.
Looks like you never worked with a decent QA team and do not understand the full scope of quality management. They have plenty of creative tasks not aligned with other roles.
Well, sort of maybe, but it's not always economical. For a normal web app - yeah I guess. Depends on the complexity of the software and the environment / inputs it deals with.
And then there's explorative testing, where I always found a good QA invaluable. Sure, you can also automate that to some degree. But someone who knows the software well and tries to find ways to get it to behave in unexpected ways, also valuable.
I would agree that solid development practices can handle 80% of the overall QA though, mainly regression testing. But those last 20%, well I think about those differently.
What do you define as "normal"? I can't think of anything harder to test than a web app.
Even a seemingly trivial static HTML site with some CSS on it will already have inconsistencies across every browser and device. Even if you fix all of that (unlikely), you still haven't done your WCAG compliance, SEO, etc.
The web is probably the best example case for needing a QA team.
Yes, I agree. We do this too. Findings are followed by a post-mortem-like process: - fix the problem - produce an automated test - evaluate why the feature wasn't autotested properly
Of course, none of this is true in the real world.
For example, just last week we had a QA essentially bring down our web application on staging environment always reproducible with a sequence of four clicks. Follow the sequence with about the proper timing and boom, exception.
Should this have been caught before a single line of code was written? Yes, it should have been caught before any code was written. However, the reality is that it did not. Should this have been caught by some unit test? Integration test? End to end test? Code review? I'd argue as we barrel down a world of AI slop, we need to slow down more. We need QA more than ever.
"QA" should exist regardless of whether you think dedicated software testing staff fit into your org. The whole team is responsible for assuring quality.
Dedicated software testers verify that the solution actually does what it's meant to do, and good software testers become deeply knowledgeable about the product and how features interact. They are ultimately a second pair of eyes, and should have a direct line to product owners or customers.
This can't be automated. The ongoing tests for verifying existing features continue to work without regression can and should be automated (throughout the dev process), adding generative AI to the human verification step is a recipe for disaster.
What could possibly go wrong?
The real reason many software orgs nowadays don't have QA is for the simple reason that it's slow. Everything in the consumer tech space is about rapid growth, and moving as fast as possible. Nobody cares very much that the software has bugs, what matters is whether it has users.
But outside of consumer tech, QA is a lot more common, since it matters a lot more that the software's logic is correct. (Speaking personally - I used to work for a genetics lab, and we had QA.) There are just different economic incentives involved.
Sorry. No 'blue screens' or stack traces in my pacemaker or insulin pump, please.
they have screens?!? /s