Thanks to AI, the coder is no longer king: All hail the QA engineer | Hacker News Reader

Thanks to AI, the coder is no longer king: All hail the QA engineer

fastcompany.com

33 pointsmsolujic11 comments

I've found GPT-4 speeds up my testing. I simply ask it to create the unit test. Usually it passes and covers at least the happy path, taking care of all the mocking so I can build on that.

This makes no sense.

AI is much better suited to writing tests and all the other busywork around preparing software for release.

And let's say something doesn't work correctly - who's going to go in and wade through AI's code to find and fix the problem? Another AI could assist no doubt, but you really need someone who can grasp software innards.

Only at painfully backward companies. CI/CD is pretty standard at this point, even if it has a manual approval or two in there, as are automated tests. I would be quite surprised to find strong AI adoption at firms without some version of these things already.

We have CI/CD but we still use our QA department. We have production permissions given to DevOps only so they must approve the pipeline, Developers cannot push to it. Dev hands off to QA, QA then hands off to DevOps.

When we went for SOX compliance our auditors were pretty firm that having developers being the ones pushing to prod and not a separate team was a security issue.

> When we went for SOX compliance our auditors were pretty firm that having developers being the ones pushing to prod and not a separate team was a security issue.

That's surprising to hear. That's a very out of date take on SOX, in my experience. I've worked in thoroughly audited FedRAMP environments where the it's devs pushing and reviewing that triggers pipelines for prod release.

I’d argue that all meaningfully qualifies as CI/CD as long as there isn’t someone manually mucking with a command line. A pipeline of who gets to push to prod isn’t a big mistake prone deal.

and who is going to write all those automated tests?

Combo of devs and QA engineers. Are there companies where devs write no tests and those are all QA written? AI helps both of those.

I am Jack’s deep seated career choice insecurity.

AI + Headless Browser + Fuzzer = QA Engineer ?

All this banter about sloppy code. Copilot smashing the boilerplate let's me focus on quality.

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