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Discussion on: The Joel Test: 20 Years Later

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shalomb profile image
Shalom Bhooshi

So either you don't test, and you lose users, or developers end up doing the testing, which is like having surgeons clean the bedpans. That way there's no need to hire additional nursing staff!

Yeowch - I get the points about relying solely on automated testing but this one statement I really take issue with. Having worked as in QA/QE and in busy Operations, it really irks me that this is how Developers view their role as too-good-to-do-the-dirty work and consider the folks who pick up the excuse-my-french as beneath them. What's worse - most management seem to set this up as acceptable and perpetuate it.

Even in a setting with manual testers, the right thing to do is put everyone on the same stead and shift-left the testing concerns so QA are at the table when development is scoped out and the overhead is distributed with Developers doing the responsible upfront testing (TDD/BDD, Code Coverage, Unit/Integration and in cases Scale/Systems/E2E testing as well) and QA "assuring" Quality (Validation/Verification, Exploratory/Ad-Hoc Testing, Hard-to-automate testing).

So either you don't test, and you lose users ..

This is so undeniably true but manual QA isn't the escape hatch to the problem however - that leads to an upside down test pyramid and really slow delivery and grumpy engineers all over. Both automated and manual testing still have a place with sensible division of QA responsibilities across Dev and Manual Testers (arguably Ops as well if you buy into SRE/CRE).

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rnowif profile image
Renaud Humbert-Labeaumaz

I'm totally on board with what you just said. I am a developer but I don't think QA is a lesser job than a developer. A good QA is at least as valuable as a good developer and a bad QA is as dangerous as a bad developer.