Comment by Etheryte
2 months ago
This paraphrased urban legend has nothing to do with quality engineering though? As described, it's designed to the spec and working as intended.
2 months ago
This paraphrased urban legend has nothing to do with quality engineering though? As described, it's designed to the spec and working as intended.
It tracks with my experience in software quality engineering. Asked to find problems with something already working well in the field. Dutifully find bugs/etc. Get told that it's working though so nobody will change anything. In dysfunctional companies, which is probably most of them, quality engineering exists to cover asses, not to actually guide development.
It is not dysfunctional to ignore unreachable "bugs". A memory leak on a missile which won't be reached because it will explode long before that amount of time has passed is not a bug.
It's a debt though. Because people will forget it's there and then at some point someone changes a counter from milliseconds to microseconds and then the issue happens 1000 times sooner.
It's never right to leave structural issues even if "they don't happen under normal conditions".
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The way it always seemed to go for me, when I was in that role, is the product is already complete, development is done, you're handed all the tests/etc that the disinterested developers care to give you, and you're told to make those tests presentable and robust, and increase test coverage. The process of doing that inevitably uncovers issues, but nobody cares because the thing is already done and working, so what was the point of any of it? The point was just to check off a box. At companies like this, the role is bullshit work.