Comment by lelanthran
21 hours ago
> We always could. That has been true since the days we programmed computers by plugging jumper wires into a panel.
That's news to me, and I'm an ancient greybeard in development.
If you have a team of 1x f/time developer and 1x f/time tester, the tester would be spending about half their day doing nothing.
Right now, a single developer with Claude code can very easily overwhelm even a couple of testers with new code to test.
> Right now, a single developer with Claude code can very easily overwhelm even a couple of testers with new code to test.
Because there are endless errors and problems that never gets fixed with AI coding. The reason testers ran out of things to test before was that developers tested themselves before sending it over, if you take a bunch of cowboy coders coding thousands of lines a day with no testing whatsoever before throwing it over to the testers you would say you don't have enough testers even if you had thousands.
> Because there are endless errors and problems that never gets fixed with AI coding.
But, that's my point :-)
> The reason testers ran out of things to test before was that developers tested themselves before sending it over, if you take a bunch of cowboy coders coding thousands of lines a day with no testing whatsoever before throwing it over to the testers you would say you don't have enough testers even if you had thousands.
Right. But even if the devs are doing unit-tests (which is all devs are supposed to do), they can still overwhelm a QA department.
We could never do this before. GGP claimed that we always could. I am disagreeing with that specific claim - "We could always overwhelm the testers".
> If you have a team of 1x f/time developer and 1x f/time tester,
Y'all have dedicated testers!? In 14 years of development, across FAANG and startup, this has never been true for me. The closest I've come is a brief period when a group of ~7 teams were able to call on the services of two testers. As you can imagine, with that ratio, the testers were not spending much time doing nothing.
I've had it at least 4 times; it's a byproduct of working in a highly regulated industry that requires the software (or goods sold) to meet a specific certification (military/munitions/EMV/etc).
In the FAANG and startup world that I worked in, there was no QA department, so I assume that FAANGs and startups don't have a dedicated and autonomous/independent QA department.
That's not the point I was making, though. The point is that we could never emit code faster than it was to deploy. Deployment (including QA) was always 2x to 4x as fast. Sometimes as much as 10x as fast.
=================
EDIT: Of course, I've been working for about twice the number of years as you, and back in those days it was pretty common for large companies to have dedicated QA. Even Microsoft had those :-)
> the tester would be spending about half their day doing nothing
That's because the developer would be spending 2/3 of their day fixing the problems the tester already found.
And the time spent writing new code has always been a rounding error from 0.