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Comment by TranquilMarmot | Hacker News Reader

I _really_ miss having a dedicated QA team / process. I noticed that the role essentially disappeared a few years back, and now developers and users have to be the ones asking "is this working the way it should be?"

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Pouring out for QA over here. My first gig ever, we had lovely QA people who spent all day just... using the application and trying to make it break. When it did, they'd fail tickets back to us, and we'd fix them. It worked so amazingly well. Now? Hurried, bored devs do it to get the next release out the door, and it shows.

I worked in QA for the first 4 years of my career. There was a lot of creativity in “how to make an application/feature break”. Sure, most of the time I didn’t realize that 10 scenarios I would run through were moot because of how a feature was implemented. But often, that “creativity” would expose major issues that I had no idea about their root cause, but would drive significant (or important) changes to the product.

One of my favorites in my first couple of months in my career was testing a service that accepted user uploads and returned some value based on the upload. I thought “oh, I should just test a butt-load of invalid files”. Where am I gonna get a butt-load of invalid files for our service? I’ll just write a script that iterates and uploads everything under my `C:\Windows` folder. Discovered 2 bugs. One was that some random binary files there caused the parser the service was using to segfault and another about how the service stored those temp files before validating them. The first required involvement from a totally different team in the company because of “how serious it was”. As a fresh college hire at the time I got a ton of praise for “exposing such a critical buffer overflow” that went undetected for years (lol, I had no idea what I was doing but I took the praise). The latter was because the developer of the service never cleared their /tmp directory where they wrote user uploads before validating them. I ended up filling the VM disk with junk that took down the entire service.

Me too. Oh man, me too. Often times, the good QA people/teams were the ones who knew how a feature fully worked. It’s limitations, extensibility, interoperability with other features, etc. In the beginning of the transition/disappearnce of QA developers were told they needed to be their own QA. And this made some sense assuming the dev would be given 2x the time for each feature. But that expectation quickly changed to build an MVP, give a demo, ship it to “get feedback from users”.

This is under appreciated. What happens is that product managers are either crippled with the fallout from double duty, or, they go mad with power at the extra clout they are given to try to compensate for the nonsense position that orgs find themselves in. Both are ugly situations, and either way we lost important checks and balances. Putting anyone else in charge of quality turns into self reporting and always has a conflict of interest

Or what happened in my company where product managers were expected to take on a marketing role, and developers were the ones left with 3 roles or product management (usually left to the dev manager), development and QA on the individual developer. You’re left with product managers have no clue how the product works. They meet with 3-8 customers or other teams a day, and come back with a check-list of “must haves”. They have no idea how the existing product works, they just know that “customer is asking for X, what’s the timeframe for adding X?”. Then dev managers who have to take product management role, so they have no time for understanding how anything is actually built. Their time is spent defining timeframes, requirements, and expectations with other teams. “We trust our developers to do the right implementation”. Then developers who just get piecemeal requirements and are asked to implement it in the simplest fastest way. No time for a major redesign or refactoring of anything. Because from the PM prospective, there is a check-list of items we need and there are 2 unchecked boxes. From the dev manager prospective, we have X and Y, so having XY makes sense. Then from the developer prospective, just duct-tape them together instead of actually building Z which is what makes sense.

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