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A comment on Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software de... by debaserab2 on Wednesday October 03, 2018 @03:09PM (#18133730)
It's easy to make the assumption that developers haven't ran the code at all, but I find in reality that's rarely the case. In my experience it almost always has something to do with an unexpected environment variant.

It's very easy as a developer to get so comfortable with the "happy path" of navigating code that you forget to look outside of the happy path when devising your test cases. It takes time to learn to identify the test cases you're not regularly exposing yourself, and these test cases are often ones not described in a requirements or specs doc.

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Re:Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software de... by egfx on Thursday October 04, 2018 @01:41AM (#18137457)
This! I spent the first half of my career in QA. This second half in dev. Coming from QA I'm very meticulous about everything and yet as soon as it leaves my hands something comes up. This is why I'm a big proponent of QA. I had a chat with someone who was pretty much dismissing QA because they had the mindset of I'll just test it or my cofounder will help. It's terribly surprising what goes down outside the confines.
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Re:Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software de... by rcollyer on Wednesday October 03, 2018 @04:54PM (#18134736)
As a QA dev, myself, I run across this occasionally. For a recent bug, the dev couldn't reproduce it, yet I could consistently. The difference: the width the window we were using; he was using the default, I was not. Most of the bugs I run into are not config dependent, so it is always surprising when one is.
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