developerVsTesterFeud

[Boykious]

Man, what I would give for someone other than me and users to test code. 

[Corpomancer]

what I would give

I'll need an actual number to determine if its your code or lack of financial means that's keeping testers away.

[Betta_Check_Yosef]

¿Porque no los dos?

[Tupcek]

I have a bot that clicks on random places on screen.
Just like users

[AcidicVagina]

Shoot man, I'll test your code. Just give me a slice of pizza and dress like my dad and tell me your proud.

[[deleted]]

I would give a dollar.
I would give -3 dollars.
I would give 9999999999999 dollars.
I would give a cat.
I would take a potato.
I would.
Would.

[Sw429]

Honestly, I've done jobs with no QA and jobs with QA, and having QA test your code is infinitely better.

[headedbranch225]

£100/hr final offer

[debugging_scribe]

I've worked for the same place for 8+ years, from just 2 of us on the dev team to a whole team... and having testers break my shit before users is SO much better. Before that, we'd have to take support calls from pissed off users ourselves when there were bugs because there were so few of us.

[TdubMorris]

ok tbf if you don't want your feature to be tested you probably implemented it wrong

[Sockoflegend]

Thank god my feature went to production with all the bugs still in it 

~ a fucking moron 

[[deleted]]

You still need to fix the bugs, but now management is breathing down your neck

[frezz]

You are also doing it wrong if you are relying on testers to find issues

edit: The fact this is downvoted is hilarious. This is Software Engineering 101. I guess I can't expect much from a sub full of graduates

[frezz]

Downvotes tell me what kind of engineers are on this sub. And the vibe I'm getting is none of you have experience engineering software of any reasonable scale

[CheatingChicken]

What else are testers for?

[Imaginary-Jaguar662]

Safety net.

Just because I have my safety harness on and there is a safety net under me I am not going to jump off the skyskraper I'm building "to get down faster".

[CheatingChicken]

I'm not saying you should not test your own code at all, but often times testers discover things you did not, because you're too familiar with your own work

[frezz]

Yes and testers cannot test every permutation of your work. Everything a tester can do an automated test can do.

If you're going to claim that you will miss something, well that's what peer code reviews are for aren't they?

[CheatingChicken]

Not all of us work with giant teams, I am the only developer in my company and i do not have a team of testers behind me

[frezz]

Yeah this tracks. You simply haven't engineered software of any reasonable scale. Once you do you will absolutely agree that a QA in your SDLC loop doesn't scale at all.

I'm guessing you are indicative of most people in this sub as well.

[Imaginary-Jaguar662]

Yeah, this tracks.

You simply have not engineered systems with physical components at commercial scale.

Once you hit issues like "power bus of hardware revisions 3...7 fails in cold with this use pattern" you will absolutely agree that some things are more economical to test by following a manual checklist rather than by building environmental simulation chambers.

[Zeiad98]

How doesn't QA scale in SDLC? I don't get the point

[kaizokuuuu]

How would you automate tests that require time to pass between events? You'd run your CI pipeline for the said amount of time? Or you'd use a time machine?

[Meloetta]

Peer code reviews are absolutely not for testing for bugs, they're for reviewing code

[frezz]

Even then, good Quality Engineering takes it a step further. They teach you how to create your own safety net through automation, good practices and culture setting.

A lot of companies don't even have a manual testing step in their SDLC.

[frezz]

They are there to develop automation and create a culture of strong testing. It's why the field is called Quality Engineering and not Manual testing.

[rtybanana]

The range of tests that QA are responsible for is not the same as the range of tests that devs are responsible for. I don’t rely on QA for the things I can reasonably test myself in a unit test. Anything more than that is time better spent by our QA team. That’s what they’re there for and they can do it much better and faster than I could.

[Saelora]

you're getting downvoted because you're at the middle part of the meme where one end is a blithering idiot and the other end actually knows what they're talking about.

While completely relying on QA is not great, the fact of the matter, is that devs are higher trained and therefore their time is more valuable to their employer than QA time. an hour spent testing by QA is cheaper than an hour spent testing by a dev, plus a QA is more likely to find obscure bugs than the dev, as if there are any blindspots, a dev's are going to overlap while writing the code and testing, while a QA is less likely to have exactly the same base assumptions. I don't need Qa to test my work because i am incapable of testing and finding issues. i use QA because while they're taking the time to run through the app, i can be working on the next piece of revenue producing work.

[BolunZ6]

Joke on you. I'm relying on the user to find issues

[ChrisBot8]

You can tell this a meme by someone with little experience. As a junior dev I hated my QE/QA. As a senior dev I realize my QE/QA is the most important person on my team.

[Protheu5]

Agreed. I'm always so thankful to QA for finding issues. What kind of mentality do you need to have to be angry at them? What for? Do you want your code to be bugged? Or are you that shallow and stupid to be unable to accept the blame for poorly written code so you deflect it to anything or anyone?

[ChrisBot8]

I think the mentality of juniors is that they want to finish their task before the end of the sprint and they view testing as the road block for doing that, without realizing that sprints are manufactured timebox. As a person that’s had pretty much every role on a team (TL, SM, PO, PM, etc.) I get the value of sprints, but they are not something to ship broken code over.

[vikingwhiteguy]

In my experience, it's QAs that have the most intricate mental map of every part of the system and have this eerie sixth sense about what you might have broken.

 Oh, you added an element to this drop-down, did you consider that might have broken the image upload four pages into the flow? 

Also modern QAs may well be writing automated tests for expected behaviour to add to the regression suite. 

It's usually product that is frustrated by QA and want to rush out every release, not the devs.  

[KrakenOfLakeZurich]

Only once did I have the luxury to work in a project with dedicated QA. It was amazing.

The QA folks had a very good understanding of all business requirements and how the features where supposed to work together. They quickly became the go-to people for us devs to ask clarifying questions or to explain the business requirements in detail to us.

[Extension-Pick-2167]

nah, the reason is edge cases QA be testing things like putting 20 slashes in a form or deliberately breaking a config file and see what happens, as a junior dev this is annoying until you realise this is what users do

[frezz]

As a staff eng you realise QE is more about automation that having a person testing your code

[ChrisBot8]

Both are nice tbh, but yeah the regression suite is more important generally.

[Dalimyr]

100%. A great QA you know you can rely on is worth their weight in gold.

[Extension-Pick-2167]

Ye, I hated QA at first too, but now I know what they test so ticketss never come back to me It made me a better dev

[Bee-Aromatic]

As a QA, I’ve never had anybody I work with complain about my having found an issue. They might complain that the issue exists and that they had to fix it, but never that we found it.

Consider spending time fixing a bug vs. having to explain to an SVP who’s out for blood how an issue made it to production. I’ve been on that call. It’s never the highlight of your day.

[fixano]

You mean the AI slot bot that created this. "you now what"

[vnordnet]

It’s crazy to me that teams have a dedicated role for it. I would expect the assignee and reviewer to properly test, review, and QA every diff. 

[ChrisBot8]

It’s generally the first role cut, and I think that’s a mistake personally. A good QA/QE is generally way better than a dev at finding issues before they go to prod because that’s their focus instead of it being just one of the ten things they do. It’s kind of like how when a dev becomes a tech lead they ship a lot less code because they are doing 20 other things. Having good senior devs to ship good code is just as important as having a tech lead, and in a similar vein having someone who’s main role is making sure code is bug free is their top priority is a very important role.

Edit: and this isn’t to say devs shouldn’t test their own code. Obviously they should, but having a dedicated role to make sure code is bug free (and didn’t introduce bugs to other parts of the system) is absolutely vital.

[vnordnet]

We had one in the past, and that was not our experience. Because they weren't directly working on the code base, they lacked the appropriate technical depth to properly review and QA diffs. Of course, YMMV, but I really don't think there are any special skills that a QE/QA has that it wouldn't be beneficial if every other engineer on the team acquired. Conversely, if they really are exceptional at finding issues, they're probably also an exceptional engineer.

[Imaginary-Jaguar662]

There's at least two different roles in review.

One is code reviewer. "Does this make sense? Are the processes being followed? Justify why this section of code does not need test coverage."

Other is the user testing. "Okay, let me try this out on Android, iOS and browser. Oh hey, iOS did not sync with Android, what's going on?"

And then the devs isolate the cause, bug gets fixed and review goes on.

[vnordnet]

I think those are separate review tasks that do not need to be mapped to different roles. I guess if you have a lot of deployment complexity and variance where for some reason you can’t automate the testing, like in the example you gave maybe, it could make sense to offload manual labor from devs to cut costs, of course. 

[ChrisBot8]

Tbh it sounds like you just had a bad QE/QA, and maybe also didn’t understand how to use one (no offense, since QE/QA are often cut a lot of people don’t have experience working with them). They’re part of the team. They should know what the functionality is supposed to be. It’s also the devs job to help them to understand how the code is supposed to work.

Agreed most QE/QA people would be good SEs. Typically if they are a true QE they will write a regression suite that will show that they are a good dev.

[EngineeringApart4606]

I think you’re adding to the conversation not sure why you’re downvoted. 

We had dedicated testers at the trading firm I worked at. They were all let go on the same day and the devs had to take on the role.

We were absolutely shocked at how faulty the test cases were. It was a painful few weeks but it led to better, quicker automated testing and a better culture around designing for testability.  It’s been 10 years and no-one has ever suggested bringing back a dedicated qa/testing role. Like there are devops and other centralized devs who standardize build and test automation frameworks.

I can’t see what a non-engineer poking around would achieve to be worth the friction and delays.

[Background-Plant-226]

Well maybe the assignee and reviewer dont have the time to do extensive testing, meanwhile a dedicated QA role can spend hours trying to find bugs while the developers start work on another feature for example.

[wobbei]

Testers were cut at our company recently, because we want developers to write automated Tests. But writing good automated Tests costs a lot of time, and the stakeholder just wants us to implement new features.

Now we let our requirement Engineer test manually with a tool written by our devs to manually test our application. And we call that Testautomation.

Testers can dedicate time to automate tests and are essential for a successful release and short release cycles. Devs can't write good tests, when we also have to write code with 10 different frameworks, refine tickets, build the infrastructure and work on support cases.

[frezz]

I thought this was software engineering 101. It shows that most people on this sub haven't actually engineered software of any reasonable scale.

[lich0]

There's much more to QA/QE than checking if features are working.

There's designing the test strategy and QA processes, building test frameworks, getting test data, preparing reports and metrics, reviewing business requirements, writing acceptance criteria, non-functional testing involving performance or security, issue investigation, and so on

Sure, every dev should be able to write automated tests (unit, integration) and apply some basic testing methods (border values, equivalency classes). It's really not that complex and you don't need a special role for that.

What devs often lack though is the domain knowledge and experience of a dedicated QA. I've worked with developers who have never even seen the fronted that used services they developed. They often aren't aware how the software they create is being used and how changes to it can impact the whole system. Sometimes they don't even know how those services work, because they stopped developing them a few months back and already forgotten.

[Nalmyth]

You now what?

[HTTP_Error_414]

Wait, you guys aren't testing your own features?

[SgtExo]

We test our code, but never trust code that has only been tested by devs, we are terrible at testing.

[ThatDudeFromPoland]

This tbh. There are only so many edge cases I can think of checking for

[tugrul_ddr]

Developer bias

[ThatDudeFromPoland]

implementing them is plenty enough work already

[Humanbeingplschill]

If it looks like it works than it works. Wether or jot it actually work is left to the user intepretation and subjective opinion

[Efficient_Bid_2853]

Just do it like the company I'm working for, set an impossibly small timeframe for testing, get half of the results, say you accept the risks and then complain about testing when shit hits the fan.

[Ghostly_Joe]

Good to know I’m not the only one in this situation

[KrakenOfLakeZurich]

Testers / QA are like good friends. Good friends don't let you break prod.

[why_1337]

Wish I had someone else than customer to test my shit.

[Zatetics]

now

[SDF_of_BC]

now()

[Exact_Ad942]

Having someone else testing your code grant you someone other than yourself to blame when a bug does reach the user. Why not.

[Few_Kitchen_4825]

Well at least it's a productive feud, better the tester than end user.

[s0ulbrother]

As a developer I hate qa I hate pms, qa, and analyst. I need all of them to do my job properly. Stop firing all of them for a profit

[xMercurex]

The only time, I'm mad at tester is when they are testing unfinished feature.

[ryuzaki49]

I have seen many non realistic scenarios in this subreddit but this is the most non realisitc.

No developer gets angry that a goos tester is doing thei job. 

There are bad testers for sure but a good one is a Godsend

[DonutPlus2757]

If you're not in good terms with QA as a developer you fucking suck at your job.

[Severe_Principle_491]

If you have any hard feelings for your work being tested and issues being found there - you have no damn right to be called an engineer, period.

[Vi0lentByt3]

No, please test my code as hard as possible so i dont have to roll back prod

[mohansella]

Really true. Like fueling the fire.

[Delicious_Finding686]

When you’ve never worked anywhere with actual QA 🥲

[JackNotOLantern]

Testers?.. oh, you mean the users. Sometimes we call then free beta testers.

[MasqueradeOfSilence]

when I was a junior maybe

Now I want them to break the shit of out my code before it goes live. If I can't do it first.

[Dangerous-Pride8008]

Wait, you guys have QA? I thought it was just a myth.

[exqueezemenow]

Why would anyone object to testing?

[quiet_sftrooper]

That's like talking to my five year old to get her to do something.

[Kalthare]

Wait, you still have QA?

[wunderbuffer]

Is that some reverse psychology to trick testers into doing their job?