Re:Signposts for “when to hire more QA testers”
by dmurray on Monday September 21, 2020 @05:13PM
(#24548544)
> With regard to the web, it's very easy to write automated tests against server-generated HTML or an HTTP API.
Funny, I find the opposite. Code for the web is hard to write reliable tests for. Typically I want to test that my component actually exists and is visible and does the right thing in a browser, so I need to produce the whole page instead of just the unit under test. This means that bugs - or just changes - in other parts of the page can make my test fail.
I'm not a front end expert and my colleagues rarely have been either, so maybe I'm missing something about best practices here, but I've definitely had the opposite experience to what you describe.
If you have good engineer-written and maintained tests, then you don't need QA.
The problem comes from relying on developers to do manual tests. It works as long as the product is simple and newcomers can learn the entire product. But, developers doing manual testing won't scale once the product becomes too complicated to remember all the corner cases and gotchas. Even worse, newcomers just won't understand the product as well as the people who originally wrote it.
So, if you have a complicated product, and a lot of debt in developer-written tests, then you need QA.
With regard to the web, it's very easy to write automated tests against server-generated HTML or an HTTP API. In contrast, other platforms are all over the place in how easy / hard it is for a developer to write an automated test.