Comment by eesmith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eesmith | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I would like to hear some comments about: "I like having dedicated testers on my team but many places don’t anymore and if you have a good process in place for automated testing you can do just fine."

In the 1990s, I recall (perhaps wrongly) one of the Microsoft books talking about one tester for every two developers.

At the tail end of the 1990s, I worked as a developer in a group with a QA team, and they caught bugs, including ones where it took me a while to even see there was a bug. Which means that I couldn't have written the tests for them.

Nowadays, I do consulting/contract programming, and my clients always do manual testing of what I shipped them, before signing off on the payment. That's in addition to the unit tests I write. And they find bugs.

So, what does it mean "if you have a good process in place for automated testing you can do just fine"? Does it mean that it's okay to let your users be your QA group, since there's a process for handling that?

Or is it something else I don't know about, given that I'm a one-person developer?

Yeah, I can expand on that. What I meant is that when I have been on teams that are basically just writing services that we are exposing via an API, it has been sufficient to just have really great test coverage and monitoring.

When I have been on teams that are doing a whole vertical as part of a product that includes UI work, it has generally been nicer to have real dedicated testers on the team.

So because I think you can't really generally say what is going to be enough, I think you just need to ask people about their process and decide based on what the project is.

Dedicated testers can be quite skilled at figuring out ways to break software (sometimes annoyingly so). As a dev I'm usually thinking of how to make my apps work, not how to make them fail.

Unit tests: certainly good, but on one team I recall there being the phrase that a good integration test was worth 1000 unit tests: if the individual parts work but they don't work together correctly as a whole system then what practical value was our unit test?

The unit tests and integration tests serve different primary functions. There may be some overlap, but if you’re good at writing them, then you already know about that and can minimize that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com