[notmyfuture]

I've also arrived at this approach and don't think it's that uncommon - IMO the article is presenting a false dichotomy.

There are still gotchas to look out for in the team-embedded QA approach. In typical team sizes, you often end up with only one QA per team - you need to make sure they have cover (everyone needs a break), and they need support in their discipline (do something to share QA knowledge across teams).

[cwkoss]

Absolutely. Disappointing to see this sort of shallow sales pitch blogspam making it to the frontpage. I'm surprised more HN readers don't see through this.

The entire purpose of this article is to self-servingly attempt to convince the reader that their product is the only solution to QA problems.

It correctly identifies some challenges with QA, but this solution is certainly not the only way to have effective QA. That Rainforest is resorting to such a disingenuous presentation of solutions to QA issues makes me think they probably don't actually solve QA problems very well.

"We have researched what makes QA successful and X, Y, and Z are what we found. Here's how we believe we're solving Z for our customers" would be a much more honest pitch.

[fredsters_s]

I totally see your point here - it's frustrating that how I presented it undermined the impact of the core point, which is that siloed ownership of quality is an anti-pattern, and an anti-pattern which is often a response to the limitations and design principles of quality tooling.

We are to my knowledge the only product built for this kind of cross-functional ownership, that's why I don't recommend other products.

While I agree the post is too marketing-y - to be honest I didn't expect it to appeal so much to the HN audience - it was written in good faith. We built the product because after 7 years of building a product for one of those silos, we became convinced that the only long-term durable solution was to empower everyone to own quality. Clearly I need to figure out how to strike the balance that you outline in your last sentence, which was the goal!

[Shacklz]

Oh c'mon. Of course a blog on the website of a company is ultimately trying to pitch their product, one way or another. That does not invalidate the points they bring up per se.

It obviously needs a bit of critical thinking when reading it and taking everything with a grain of salt, but that's something I really hope we can expect people on HN to be capable of?

[vlovich123]

QA also works best for features that the user can meaningfully interact with. The more esoteric, interconnected, or complex the failure is, the more it gets muddled with other reports and weird conditions (it breaks on 3pm when the moon is in equinox and I have my mouse pointed north). That’s an over exaggeration but the sentiment is accurate. QA will frequently lack a deeper understanding of how the software works and is connected. That ignorance can be valuable (finds blind spots) but has trade offs (assumptions are made based on imperfect observation of cause and effect where human biases lead you down dark hallways). Speaking from experience with lots of manual QA which is actually a rarity these days.

The other thing to consider is, if you’re careful, user feedback can be obtained more quickly. If you can keep things stable, then you won’t upset your users too badly and you’ll avoid the need for QA to act as a stand in.

[chx]

> (it breaks on 3pm when the moon is in equinox and I have my mouse pointed north). That’s an over exaggeration

it's not.

OpenOffice won't print on Tuesdays https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...

etc

[notmyfuture]

I agree, this all makes sense. Although I think the team-embedded QA is generally the right thing, I wouldn't use it blindly in all cases. Some teams I manage only produce HTTP API's, these are ideal candidates for automated testing (incl. end-to-end integrated tests) and the developers are happy to own this without a QA on the team.

[varenc]

Agreed it's presenting a false dichotomy. The article ends with a pitch for Rainforest's "no-code" QA platform so it makes sense they want to present their product as the clear solution. I could take the article more seriously if it at least mentioned a more integrated approach.

[Agentlien]

What size team do you consider typical?

Most projects I've worked on have been games where the studio was split into teams of about 6-10 people with one dedicated in-house QA member for some but not all teams, a few in-house QA workers not assigned to a specific team, plus a much larger external QA team (from the parent company/ publisher). That has worked great.

I've also been on projects with only external QA. It works, but the lack of internal QA has been a frequent annoyance.

[notmyfuture]

Yeah - in my experience 6-10 people per team is typical, often with one of them being dedicated QA. Having this, plus a separate central QA team is one way to address the pitfalls of embedded QA I was pointing out - they can cover for time away for team QA, or act as bench capacity.

[ethbr0]

IMHO, the reason embedded QA works better is because QA is fundamentally a negative task. In that you are telling people they made a mistake.

That's difficult to hear, repeatedly, from the same person. And I've seen a lot of developers not react well to the underlying discomfort.

When it's an external team, at arm's length, that relationship can get pretty bad.

At least when it's someone on your team, then you have non-QA moments and interactions to help balance out the unfortunate bug truth.

And the end result is faster, more thorough, more productive bidirectional communication between QA and coders.