[IKantRead]

A good QA person is to a software developer as a good editor is to a writer. Both take a look at your hard work and critique it ruthlessly. Annoying as hell when it's happening, but in my experience well worth it because the end result is much higher quality.

I might just be too old, but I remember when QA people didn't typically write tests, they manually tested your code and did all those weird things you were really hoping users wouldn't do. They found issues and bugs that would be hard to universally catch with tests.

Now we hoist QA on the user.

Working with younger devs I find that the very concept of QA is something that is increasingly foreign to them. It's astounding how often I've seen bugs get to prod and ask "how did it work when you play around with it locally?" only to get strange looks: it passed the type checker, why not ship it?

Programmer efficiency these days is measured in PRs/minute, so introducing bugs is not only not a problem, but great because it means you have another PR you can push in a few days once someone else notices it in prod! QA would have ruined this.

[bumby]

>Now we hoist QA on the user.

This drives me crazy. It's a cheap way of saying we're ok shipping crap. In the past, I've been part of some QA audits where the developers claimed their customer support log sufficed as their test plan. This wasn't safety-critical software, but it did involve what I would consider medium risk (e.g., regulatory compliance). The fact that they openly admit they are okay shipping bad products in that environment just doesn't make sense to me.