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Comment by sytse | Hacker News Reader

I agree with not asking the developers of the feature. I don't think it should be part of product. QA is a deeply technical job. At GitLab QA gets own department called Quality. They are on the same level as development, design, development, and infrastructure. The people in it are mostly Software engineers in test. For more information please see https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/quality/

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Some of QA is technical needlessly; we think that's a common issue with tooling today. QA today is just not accessible to folks that think about and manage change to the product, namely product folks.

Why don't you think it should be part of product?

Love that your department is called "Quality", implies more metrics-less-feeling before reading the doc.

Thanks Russell. In our experience a lot of QA improvements require automation which is more of a software engineering job than a product management one.

I think this is mostly true today, but something which we think of as broken and we're fixing. We believe it should be accessible to a wider audience outside of just engineering; there is a lot to do, but we're starting with UI automation.

> folks that think about and manage change to the product, namely product folks

It's weird to me that the software engineers building the product are not viewed as "product folk".

The people designing the architecture for and building the actual product aren't managing the changes to it or concerned about it? The people who have to address any defects in it aren't concerned about their processes as they pertain to quality?

This sort of worldview seems anti-agile and anti-lean TBH.

Nowhere do we say that the entire product organization - devs, designers, PMs - should not care about quality. It's a question of ownership and focus.

Engineering needs to own and focus on quality. It's construction that determines quality. It's construction that addresses defects. It's engineering that owns construction.

If engineers aren't owning and focused on quality the business either doesn't really believe there are quality issues or there is a huge alignment issue.

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