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Discussion on: Are Testers, QAs & QEs relevant in today's software development lifecycles? Asking for a friend.

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scriptmunkee profile image
Ken Simeon • Edited

Isidro, thanks for the response.

I agree that its the directional role of the QA team member to evaluate/test the implementations of a developer's work as a customer. But I wonder how you thing a developer knows their code is right if they don't know or care how a customer will use it?

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bluestrattos profile image
Isidro Goncalves

We can never guess user behaviour. Just because he should press that nice green button, doesn't mean he will. We can develop the features and protect the application to avoid exceptions, errors, and handle all that but we need QA to work with us, make sure that if the user's cat jump in the keyboard, and if option B is selected and he press the green button everything still works fine

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scriptmunkee profile image
Ken Simeon

oh man . . . you brought out the cat test 😂

So if I could rashly summarize what you're saying. A developer should build their software to handle all of the potential logical pathways. QA would also validate those logical pathways manually & hopefully automated as well. But then a QA should also test the illogical potentials or unpredictable interactions to make sure the logical gates function accordingly (aka the Cat on keyboard test).

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ahferroin7 profile image
Austin S. Hemmelgarn

Usually by writing the code to meet the exact requirements they were given, and then writing unit tests (which should absolutely be the developer's responsibility) that verify that it behaves the way they were told it should.

The thing is, it's not unusual for the description given to the developer to be under-specified, and as such not unusual that some of the behavior is left up to the implementation, which may cause issues for end users. So it's fully possible for the code to 'work correctly' as per what the developer was told, but still not do everything it's supposed to.

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scriptmunkee profile image
Ken Simeon

You are very right. The potential gaps in requirements and/or expectations definitely can lead to issues or unintended behaviors.