HACKER Q&A
📣 shortrounddev2

What is QA like at your company


I started at a company that paid actual human beings to QA test our software. We would set each QA person up with a dedicated environment with builds/release candidates and they would simply try to break the product. The notable thing was that these people were NOT engineers and we did not write automated frontend tests with Puppeteer or Playwright, it was simple human QA testing. This company had a very high standard for quality and we had very few fires to put out.

These days, when I talk to people about QA, software engineers have a kind of contempt for this type of QA, and prefer to write automated playwright tests for all UI interactions. To me, this sounds more complicated and more expensive (paying a software engineer to write a test over X hours compared to paying an entry level office worker to manually test something over Y hours, where I assume X > Y). When I'm in these discussions, people are actually quite opinionated that we should NOT hire QA people, and software engineers should do all QA via automated testing

What is QA like where you work? Is there a culture of trying to automate it all away, or is it still more manual? What do you prefer?

  👤 mixmastamyk Accepted Answer ✓
You need both automated and manual testing for a high-quality product. However, this level of quality is not strictly necessary for most products or projects, and so you see most shops today preferring the cheaper alternative.

Automated testing is perhaps an order of magnitude cheaper. Written once, run thousands of times, protecting the project, potentially for decades. The sooner you find the bug, less people need to be involved to fix it. Including customers that might turn away. (That's why the renewed interest in typing and linters that find bugs before you even finish writing a statement.)

The reason automated testing is necessary is that humans get bored quickly. They are needed to prevent subtle (and not so) regressions not obvious at a glance.

Humans are a lot more clever though, so can provide insight on a higher level, though at higher cost. That cost may be worth paying. If your product is mission critical or adjacent, and the customer is willing to pay for that "insurance."