At the start of my career (late 70s), I worked at IBM (Hursley Park) in Product Assurance (their version of QA). We wrote code and built hardware to test the product that was our area of responsibility (it was a word processing system). We wrote test cases that our code would drive against the system under test. Any issues we would describe in general terms to the development team -- we didn't want them to figure out our testcases -- we wanted them to fix the bugs. Of course, this meant that we would find (say) three bugs in linewrapping of hyphenated words and the use of backspace to delete characters, and then the development team would fix four bugs in that area <i>but</i> only two of the actual bugs that we had found. This meant that you could use fancy statistics to estimate the actual number of bugs left.<p>When I've worked for organizations without QA teams, I introduce the concept of "sniff tests". This is a short (typically 1 hour) test session where anybody in the company / department is encouraged to come and bash on the new feature. The feature is supposed to be complete, but it always turns out that the edge cases just don't work. I've been in these test session where we have generated 100 bug tickets in an hour (many are duplicates). I like putting "" into every field and pressing submit. I like trying to just use the keyboard to navigate the UI. I run my system with larger fonts by default. I sometime run my browser at 110% zoom. It used to be surprising how often these simple tests would lead to problems. I'm not surprised any more!
I worked at two companies 15-20 years ago that invested in top-tier QA teams. They were worth their weight in gold. The products were world class because the QA team were fantastic at finding bugs we developers didn't think of looking for because we were too close to the problem. We are too used to looking at the happy path.<p>One key attribute to both companies is that it was dictated from on high that the QA team had final say whether the release went to production or not.<p>These days companies think having the developers write automated tests and spend an inordinate amount of time worrying over code coverage is better. I can't count how many products I've seen with 100% code coverage that objectively, quantifiably doesn't work.<p>I'm not saying automated testing is bad. I'm saying, just as the author does, that doing away with human QA testers is.
> The most conscientious employees in your organization are the most bitter. They see the quality issues, they often address them, and they get no recognition for doing so. When they speak up about quality concerns, they get treated like mouthbreathers who want to slow down. They watch the “move fast and break things” crowd get rewarded time after time, while they run around angrily cleaning up their messes. To these folks, it feels like giving a damn is a huge career liability in your organization. Because it is.<p>This is the bitter truth, no one wants to acknowledge.<p>DBAs and Infra, are in the same boat as QAs. Pendulam will swing back in not so long time frame i hope.
The main problem with QA teams is the same problem with IT teams or even management. If they are doing their jobs well they appear to be doing nothing.<p>This often creates a situation where people need to "justify" their jobs. Usually this happens due to an over reliance upon metrics (see Goodhart's Law) rather than understanding what the metrics are proxying and what the actual purpose of the job is. A bad QA team is one who is overly nitpicky, looking to ensure they have something to say. A good QA team simultaneous checks for quality as well as trains employees to produce higher quality.<p>I do feel like there is a lack of training going on in the workforce. We had the "95%-ile isn't that good"[0] post on the front page not long ago and literally it is saying "It's easy to get to the top 5% of performers in any field because most performers don't actively train or have active feedback." It's like the difference between being on an amateur sports team vs a professional. Shouldn't businesses be operating like the latter? Constantly training? Should make hiring be viewed differently too, as in "can we turn this person into a top performer" rather than "are they already" because the latter isn't as meaningful as it appears when your environment is vastly different than the one where success was demonstrated.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38560345">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38560345</a>
This point is brought up in the article but I think it is at the real heart of the issue.<p>QA is almost always seen as a 'cost center' by the business and upper management. I have a hypothesis that you never ought to work in a department that is seen as a 'cost center'. The bonuses, the recognition, and the respect always goes to the money makers. The cost center is the first place to get more work with less hands, get blamed for failures, and ultimately fired when the business needs to slim up. I think the same thing applies to IT.<p>This spiral is why QA will always be a harder career than just taking similar skills and being a developer. It self reinforces that the best people get fed up and switch out as soon as they can.
“ To these folks, it feels like giving a damn is a huge career liability in your organization. Because it is.”<p>And it’s easy to see why.<p>Software Quality, Cose Maintainability, Good Design. These things only matter if you are planning to work on that company for a long time. If you’re planning to stay a couple years then hop to the next company, the most optimal path is to rise fast by doing high visibility work, then find use your meteoric rise as a resume material to get a higher paying job. Rinse and repeat. If that project is going to break or become unmaintainable in a couple years, who cares? You’re not going to be there.<p>Recognize the pattern? Startups work the same. It’s the “growth mindset” imprinted everywhere. If this product becomes unmaintainable in 5 years, who cares? I will have exited and cashed in.<p>I don’t judge people who do that exactly because it’s the practice the companies themselves use. I don’t like it, I actually hate it, but I understand people are just playing by the rules.<p>The fun part is watching managers and executives complaining about employee turnover, lack of company engagement, quiet quitting, like this isn’t them tasting their own poison.
QA Engineers are some of the best debuggers too. They have their hands in the pipeline, src and test directories, and often work with all aspects of developing and deploying the application.<p>When I was a QA lead I often ran into software engineers that couldn’t be bothered to read a pipeline error message (and would complain daily in Slack) and when it came to optimizing the pipeline they would ignore base problems and pretend the issues that stemmed from the base problems were magical and not understood. Wasting days guessing at a solution.<p>The disrespect a QA engineer sees is not exaggerated in this article. Since most companies with QA orgs do not have a rigorous interviewing process like the Engineering orgs, the QA engineers are seen as lesser. The only SWE that have respect for them that I’ve met are the people who worked in QA themselves. The disrespect is so rampant that I myself have switched back to the Engineering org (I tried using seniority as a principal engineer and even shifted as a manager to make changes, but this failed because Engineering could not see past their own hubris and leadership peoples will not help you). My previous company before I was laid off hired a new CTO who claimed we could just automate away QA needs but had no examples of what she was talking about. This is the level of respect poured down from the top about building good software.
Microsoft is probably the one case where this sticks out the most, at least for me anyways. Noticeably more bugs in updates since they dropped their QA team, in Windows as well as cloud products.
This might be my personal experience, but I've never encountered a QA team that actually writes the tests for engineering.<p>I have only had QA teams that wrote "test plans" and executed them manually, and in rarer cases, via automated browser / device tests. I consider these types of tests to be valuable, but less so than "unit tests" or "integration tests".<p>With this model, I have found that the engineering team ends up being the QA team in practice, and then the actual QA team often only finds bugs that aren't really bugs, just creating noise and taking away more value than they provide.<p>I would love to learn about QA team models that work. Manual tests are great, but they only go so far in my experience.<p>I'm not trying to knock on QA folks, I'm just sharing my experience.
When we built FoundationDB, we had a maniacal focus on quality and testing. So much so that we built it in a language we invented, called Flow, that allowed us to deterministically simulate arbitrary sized FDB clusters and subject them to crazy conditions, then flag each system property violation and be able to perfectly reproduce the test run that triggered the violation.<p>We got to a point where the default was that all of our 10,000's of test runs each night would flash green if no new code was introduced. Tests that flashed red were almost always due to recent code additions, and therefore easily identified and fixed. It let our team develop knowing that any bugs they introduced would be quickly caught, and this translated to being able to confidently take on crazy new projects - like re-writing our transaction processing system post-launch and getting a 10x speed increase out of it.<p>In the end our focus on quality led to velocity - they weren't mutually exclusive at all. We don't think this is an isolated phenomenon, which led us to our newest project - but that's a story for another time.
I had a boss at Yahoo who gave our QA to another team because "Facebook doesn't use QA, we shouldn't either". I can't remember if it was Facebook or MS, but he was willing to buy all of us a book talking about how amazing it was.<p>Long story short, it wasn't. It was like taking away a crutch. Of course we could have been more diligent about testing before having QA validate it, but it slowed development down so much trying to learn all the things we never thought to test that QA did automatically.
In making the case for building up a QA org at my current startup, I repeat the mantra that QA is both a skillset and a mindset. Automated tests can tell us a lot, but skilled QA testers are amazing at edge cases to break things and providing human feedback about what looks and feels good gor users.
I was lucky enough to work in a small eng team with 1 full-time dedicated QA person. One of the very few coworkers from my long career that I have really tried hard to poach away from whatever they were doing after our shared workplace went bust.<p>Yes, part of the job was to write and run manual test suites, and to sign off as the DRI that a certain version had had all the automated and manual tests pass before release.<p>But their main value was in the completely vague mandate "get in there and try to break it." Having someone who knows the system and can really dig into the weak spots to find problems that devs will try to handwave away ("just one report of the problem? probably just some flaky browser extension") is so valuable.<p>In my current job, I have tried for 5+ years to get leadership to agree to a FT QA function. No dice. "Developers should test their own code." Yeah and humans should stop polluting the ocean and using fossil fuels, how's that going?
I strongly disagree.<p>I worked at a company with a world-class QA team. They were amazing and I can't say enough nice things about them. They were comprehensive and professional and amazing human beings. They had great attention to detail and they catalogued a huge spreadsheet of manual things to test. Engineers loved working with them.<p>However -- the end result was that engineers got lazy. They were throwing code over to QA while barely testing code themselves. They were entirely reliant on manual QA, so every release bounced back and forth several times before release. Sometimes, we had feature branches being tested for months, creating HUGE merge conflicts.<p>Of course, management noticed this was inefficient, so they formed another team dedicated to automated QA. But their coverage was always tiny, and they didn't have resources to cover every release, so everyone wanted to continue using manual QA for CYA purposes.<p>When I started my own company, I hired some of my old engineering coworkers. I decided to not hire QA at all, which was controversial because we _loved_ our old QA team. However, the end result was that we were much faster.<p>1. It forced us to invest heavily on automation (parallelizing the bejesus out of everything, so it runs in <15min), making us much faster<p>2. Engineers had a _lot_ of motivation to test things well themselves because there was no CYA culture. They couldn't throw things over a wall and wash their hands of any accountability.<p>We also didn't have a lack of end-to-end tests, as the author alludes to. Almost all of our tests were functional / integration tests, that run on top of a docker-compose set up that simulated production pretty well. After all, are unit tests where you mock every data source helpful at all? We invested a lot of time in making realistic fixtures.<p>Sure, we released some small bugs. But we never had huge, show stopping bugs because engineers acted as owners, carefully testing the worst-case scenarios themselves.<p>The only downside was that we were slower to catch subtle, not-caught-by-Sentry bugs, so things like UX transition weirdness. But that was mostly okay.<p>Now, there is still a use case for manual QA -- it's a question of risk tolerance. However, most applications don't fit that category.
I stepping-stoned through QA on my way into development, now a decade something ago, and this part stands out as especially true in my experience:<p>> This created a self-reinforcing spiral, in which anyone “good enough at coding” or fed up with being treated poorly would leave QA. Similarly, others would assume anyone in QA wasn’t “good enough” to exit the discipline. No one recommends the field to new grads. Eventually, the whole thing seemed like it wasn’t worth it any more. Our divorce with QA was a cold one — companies just said “we’re no longer going to have that function, figure it out.”<p>I've worked with a handful of talented career software QA people in the past. The sanity they can bring to a complex system is amazing, but it seems like a shrinking niche. The writing was on the wall for me that I needed and wanted to get into fulltime dev as QA got increasingly squeezed, mistreated, and misunderstood. At so many companies QA roles went into a death spiral and haven't recovered.<p>Now, as the author points out, a lot of younger engineers have never worked with a QA team in their career. Or maybe have worked with a crappy QA team because its been devalued so much. So many people have never seen good QA that no one advocates for it.
For QA to be respected and protected, it has to identify what it's responsible for.<p>Luckily, that's easy: the "fault model", all the ways things can break. That tends to be a lot more complex than the operating model, the domain model, or the business model.<p>Once all the potential issues and associated costs for all the fault models are enumerated, then QA can happily offer to any other organization the responsibility for each one, and see who steps up to take it on.<p>In many cases, it can be done more cheaply in design, engineering, or automation; it's usually easier to prevent a problem than capture, triage, debug, fix, and re-deploy.<p>Organizations commonly make the mistake of being oblivious to the fault models and failing to allocate responsibility. That's possible because most failures are rare, and the link from consequences back to cause is often unclear. The responsibility allocation devolves to blame, and blame to "who touched this last"? But catastrophic feedback is a terrible way to learn, and chronic irritants are among the best ways to lose customers and staff.
Another part is that there is barely any training for QA people. Even your average CS course will only graze the top of the topic, most usually some prof droning on about Java unit tests on some really old version of Java and a testing framework just as old.<p>There are no "Software Quality Assurance" academic degrees, there's barely any research into testing methodologies, there's barely any commercial engagement in the space aside from test run environments (aka, selling shovels to gold diggers), and let's face truth, also in tooling. And everything <i>but</i> software QA is an even worse state, with "training" usually consisting of a few weeks of "learning on the job".<p>Basic stuff like "how does one even write a test plan", "how does one keep track of bugs", "how to determine what needs to be tested in what way (unit, integration, e2e)" is at best cargo-culted in the organization, at worst everyone is left to reinvent the wheel themselves, and you end up with 13 different "testing" jobs in a manually clicked-together Jenkins server, for one project.<p>> Defect Investigation: Reproduction, or “repro”, is a critical part of managing bugs. In order to expedite fixes, somebody has to do the legwork to translate “I tried to buy a movie ticket and it didn’t work” into “character encoding issues broke the purchase flow for a customer with a non-English character in their name”.<p>And this would normally not be the job of a QA person, that's 1st level support's job, but outsourcing to Indian body shops or outright AI chatbots is cheaper than hiring competent support staff.<p>That also ties in to another aspect I found lacking in the article: <i>users are expected to be your testers for free</i> aka you sell bananaware. No matter if it's AAA games, computer OSes, phones, even <i>cars</i>...
I hired a great QA Developer a few months ago. They are building out integration, performance and end to end tests; finding bugs, speeding up releases and generally making things better.<p>I get asked, every week, if they are contributing and what are they contributing.<p>It's exhausting, so I can't imagine what it feels like to actually BE in QA.
Agree with the sentiment of this article but the disturbing ai generated images every paragraph were definitely not necessary - do people actually need to see these?
So for me, the QA team is the best source of product information in the entire engineering team. If they also do customer triage, then probably in the entire company.<p>They should know the product inside out, moreover, they know all the annoying bits that are unsexy and not actively developed.<p>yes, they find bugs and junk, but, they know how your product should be used, and the quickest/easiest way to use it. Which are often two different paths.<p>Bring your QA in the product cycle, ask them what the stuff that pisses them off the most.<p>They also should be the masters of writing clear and precise instructions, something devs and product owners could learn from.
At our small tech company, QA is elevated to a whole different level. The QA lead(s) are involved in all product planning meetings and develop the requirements with the product team. Our QA lead has a phd and two have masters degrees! They know how the application is supposed to work better than most of the developers and play a big role throughout development. In my opinion (as the person that leads the developers), this is how it should work. They aren't some separate team we chunk over stuff to at the end of the day.
Strongly disagree with the literal premise of this post. The idea of having a separate team with the mandate to “ensure quality” was always ridiculous. Occasionally it was helpful by accident but it was always ridiculous. “Quality” isn’t something you can bake in afterwards by testing a bunch.<p>Getting rid of everyone with testing expertise, and treating testing expertise as inherently less valuable that implementation expertise? Sure, you could convince me that was a bad idea.
I can't agree more.<p>> Focus: There is real value in having people at your company whose focus is on the quality of your end product. Quality might be “everybody’s job”…but it should also be “somebody’s job”.
Yes indeed, naturally every person have just one focus, having dedicated person focus on QA is important.<p>Another practice, or buzz word (or used to be buzz word:) ), Exploratory Testing, which can pretty much be conducted only by dedicated QA.
I joined my current company just months before they started to cut down small QA team we had then. QA Automation was supposed to be the answer. 1.5 years forward - product quality dropped, automation for the client side application barely exists and even those parts that is covered by it prone to bugs.<p>I tried to draw attention to the fact that at least some manual QA is needed, but even after obvious fail (some people lost their job) managers are adamant. Automation, 'special bug-hunting projects', 'we should concentrate on code quality' lectures, all-hands testing - anything, instead of very obvious solution to get QA team back. Development time is up, regression is often, communication became harder.<p>The only QA who still works in the company (now in a different role) became invaluable, because he is one of the very few people who deeply understands the product as a whole and knows all the services we work with.<p>I can't think of another example of so very obvious mistake and solution to it, that's being ignored so relentless.
I am currently working with a startup that spends a lot of time on building tests that need to be refactored every sprint because it's early stage and the assumptions change. I am shocked at the amount of developer-hours spent on tests that need to be disabled / deleted instead of just hiring 1 - 2 super cheap manual testers that just go through the flows days in and out.<p>For me it's a no brainer, if I were CEO / CTO, until product-market-fit is achieved and exponential growth is visible, I'd just outsource Q&A and that's that.
I completely agree with the sentiment of this article: It is a big problem that being a "software tester" is not at all as prestigious as being a software engineer. Having someone who really understands how the users interact with the software and systematically covers all behavior in test cases is very valuable.<p>I experienced both worlds: I worked in an organization where 4 QA engineers tested each release that was built by 6 software engineers. Now I'm in a situation where 0 QA engineers test the work of 8 software engineers. In the second case the software engineers actually do all the testing, but not that systematically because it's not their job to optimize the testing process.<p>Having someone with the capabilities of a software engineer who's daily work is uncovering defects and verifying functionality is important. Paying someone who owns the testing process is more than justified commercially. The problem is: You don't find those people. For various reasons. Therefor you are stuck with making the software engineers do the testing.<p>But there is hope. There is a new standard released for my industry that requires organizations to have a QA department that is independent of the software engineering department. If they don't have that, they are not allowed to role out there software product complaint to the standard. Maybe this will help to reintroduce the QA Engineer as an important and prestigious role.
Having a QA team is like having an Ops team with stuff being 'thrown over the wall' to the downstream.<p>There's two kinds of tests. Regression testing, that should be automated and written and maintained by devs. New feature or change testing should be done by those that defined them, namely Product people. In the best case it's an iterative and collaborative process, where things can be evaluated in dev/test environments, staging environments, or production for beta flag enabled test users.
It's not so much a Shakespearean "to have a QA team or not ...", but responsibility and accountability.<p>SWEs must produce unit testing because they know the code best. Dumping this responsibility onto QA is slow, evil, and wrong like quality control only vs. QA+QC.<p>QA teams must have the authority to ensure complicated code gets unit testing code coverage.<p>QA teams should provide partial and full-up integration tools and testing with the support of SWEs.<p>QA teams must have stop-the-assembly-line authority to ensure quality and testing requirements are met.<p>QA teams (or tools teams that support multiple QA teams) must make testing faster and more efficient.<p>There ought to be a suite of smoke tests such that untested code cannot be committed to the "production" branch, whatever that looks like, except in rare extreme emergencies.<p>All production-ready commits should be squashed, signed-off by another SWE, and have a test plan.<p>Test plans should be auto-generated, wherever possible.<p>Tests combined with test infrastructure should be able to be added to auto-bisect/blame breakage<p>Which tests must run and pass to accept a production proposed diff should be auto-minimized to those that touch particular area(s) and their precise-as-possible-but-still-correct dependencies.<p>Other areas that must not be neglected and shoveled onto SWEs: product management, UAT, UX, and operations.
Systems used by humans have to be tested by humans. Those testers can either be your customers, or your QA team - as your dev and sales teams will be busy doing other things.
Getting rid of QA teams are a slow ticking bomb frequently imho. Cause some issues are might not be even breaking functionality. You can mess up some tracking/analytics and managers will make wrong decisions based on incorrect data.
But personally I feel like within few years everything might change a lot. Machines 100% will be be better at coding, maintenance and testing things.
QA has always been about risk management. There are multiple ways to manage risk, and some of those ways can be more cost effective to a business. As software shifted towards SaaS offerings, deployments (and rollbacks) became quicker, customer feedback loops also got lightning fast. Team's can manage the risk of a bug more efficiently by optimizing for mean-time-to-recovery. This muscle is not one that QA teams are particularly optimized for, thus their effectiveness in this new model was reduced. I've found that holding on to QA function in this environment can severely dilute the ownership of quality as a requirement from engineers.<p>QA is still extremely valuable in any software that has long deployment lead times. Mobile apps, On-Prem solutions, anything that cannot be deployed or rolled back within minutes can benefit from a dedicated QA team that can manage the risk appropriately.
Ignoring the common trope that developers are bad testers (I am, but not all devs are), QA presence allows teams to move faster by reducing the developer test burden to automated regression, and developer acceptance testing only. Good QA can often assist with those tasks too, further improving team velocity. Also, moving tasks to people who specialise in them is not usually a poor decision.<p>The best way I've found to sell QA to management (especially sales/marketing/non-technical management), is to redefine them as marketing. QA output is as much about product and brand reputation management as finding bugs. IMO, nothing alienates customers faster than bugs, and bad experiences result in poor reputation. Marketing and sales people can usually assign value to passive marketing efforts, and recognise things that are damaging to retention and future sales.
Testing has always been a <i>huge</i> deal with me. I tend to work alone, so I usually have to test my own stuff[0]. I’m pretty brutal. I learned from the best. I really feel that the level of testing I went through, for most of my career, would have a lot of modern devs, curled up in a fetal position, under their desks, whimpering.<p>We are currently in a “phase 2” test, of the project we’ve worked on, for the last year or so. It has shown us some issues (nothing major, though). Phase 1 testing showed us some nasties.<p>I had to force the team to do all this testing. They would have happily released before phase 1. I don’t think it would have ended well.<p>[0] <a href="https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/testing-harness-vs-unit/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/testing-harness-vs-u...</a>
I personally think that having worked in both environments, the biggest issue is companies missing that triage function for bugs, etc. from people who can turn a customer reported bug into a step by step guide for reproducing things.<p>When I worked in the simulation space we used to get models sent in by customers where a convergence problem or crash would occur in 12 hours of running on a 128 core machine. Those were impossible as a developer to work with in debug mode which made the runtime even longer, so they needed someone to identify the cause of the problem and distill it down to a much smaller model where the bug could be replicated. The QA team in that were really application engineers and were subject matter experts, and they were absolutely invaluable.
This is a symptom of a larger issue in tech where C/E suites are trying really hard to turn engineers into some sort of fungible cogs in the system that can be swapped in and out and in different parts of the system and still have everything work perfectly in order.
I noticed this trend a couple of years ago, they called it Shift-Left.<p>Basically, it was a way to get a developer to do more testing during development before handing over a feature to QA. This sets up the imagined possibility of firing all QA staff and having developers write perfect code that never needs to be tested thoroughly. Looks great on paper...<p>At a previous company, they started firing all of the manual QA devs and replacing them with offshore QA people who could do automated testing development (Cypress tests). The only problem was that those fired QA team members had significant business domain knowledge that never was transferred or written down. The result was a dumpster fire every week, with the usual offshore nightmares and panicked responses.<p>Make no mistake about this, it's just a cost-cutting measure with an impact that is rarely felt immediately by management. I've worked with stellar manual QA people and our effort resulted in bulletproof software that handled edge cases, legacy customers, API versions, etc. Without these people, your software eventually becomes IT-IS-WHAT-IT-IS and your position is always threatened due to the lack of quality controls.
Maybe it's hard to find enough technically strong engineers with a passion on testing. Microsoft used to advocate how technically challenging to be a SDET - software engineer in test. IBM used to tell its test teams that testing engineers know the big picture, understand the products, and have to do awesome technical work. Unfortunately in reality, more engineers are more willing to directly develop products than becoming an expert in test.
>>> slowest part of software delivery is testing<p>In my experience the slowest part has been marking a feature as done. I loved working at places with QA. I could assign tickets to QA once the PR was up.<p>Now I gotta build in that I’ll be bumping PRs for review for approximately 30-50% of the time I’m working on a feature.
Speaking of QA, using AI to generate comic-book-style illustrations is great until one of your heroes has 6 and 8 digits per hand.<p>At least with the comic style, you could plausibly say that that's canon to her character.
i never felt that devops and qa were at odds the way that this article suggests they are. in my experience nobody wants to or knows how to do run QA correctly so the org shoots themselves in the foot and does one of two things:<p>1. hire a contractor who just has no idea about anything.
2. hire someone and place them outside the engineering org (on the support team as a "support engineer" seems pretty popular) where they have little to no interaction with either engineering _or_ customers and expect them to work miracles.
I really like working with good QA teams...
... maybe because I've never worked with a bad team.
As a developer, familiarizing myself with QA processes has never been a mistake, either.
It makes a huge difference. It kinda feels bad to have your work dissected, but it feels so great to have institutional permission to slow down and make your work good
A couple things I miss from not having dedicated QA:<p>1) someone who deeply understands how the product should work<p>2) someone who’s good at writing performant and maintainable tests
The problem with QA is nobody outside of QA understands QA. They think QC is QA so they automate their QC "testing" and assume that is QA. It's not. Moreover they never listen to QA nor respect them as people.<p>QA are usually the best people to know what's what when the rubber meets the road.
They know where the bodies are buried.
They often understand and have a pulse on customers and usage better than product managers.
They know the ins-and-outs of how various features interact and how a product as a whole works better than silo'd developers.<p>Historically they were effectively the only "product owners" that could certify a release before it went out.
They would coordinate with the right people to ensure all technical and non-technical deliverables and dependencies were met before releases. T
hey would be the best approximate and power users.<p>They often maintained test infrastructures on which deployments could be tested. In fact, they were the origins of automation or DevOps as a "thing" because they are the ones who saw all the friction points daily giving rise to CI/CD. Often times nobody listened because they were concerned with features.<p>QA has always been about investing resources within an organization to improve it. In effect, building things for within it to improve it. Now that we have gotten the message to some degree of optimizing some manual pain points -- we kick to the curb those who got us there without any regard to the value they provided -- and instead decide to push to prod and test on production to piss off customers even more.<p>If you ask yourself -- would you feel comfortable driving a car that was built and tested with automation alone? What about a space shuttle or an airplane? Or about medications?Or would you prefer that a human test drivers or test pilots put those products through their paces before signing off on them? -- it might drive it home better.<p>But then again software industry has devolved since the tech bro + VC culture pretty much ate it as they chased those sweet $$$