Comment by dylan604
18 hours ago
> QA is a lot cheaper than dev.
QA is definitely one of those "you get what you pay for". A dev just bangs out code on what is assumed "happy path" which means the user uses it as the dev expects. QA has to some how think of all the inane ways that a user will actually try using the thing knowing that not all users are technically savvy at all. They are actively trying to break things not just feed in clean data to produce expected outputs. Let's face it, that's exactly what devs do when they "test". They are specifically trying to get unexpected outputs to see how things behave. At least, good QA teams do.
I worked with a QA person who I actively told anyone that listened that the specific QA person deserved a higher salary than I did as the dev. They caught some crazy situations where product was much better after fixing.
> QA has to some how think of all the inane ways that a user will actually try using the thing knowing that not all users are technically savvy at all.
The classical joke is: (this variant from Brenan Keller[0])
A QA engineer walks into a bar.
- Orders a beer.
- Orders 0 beers.
- Orders 99999999999 beers.
- Orders a lizard.
- Orders -1 beers.
- Orders a ueicbksjdhd.
First real customer walks in and asks where the bathroom is.
The bar bursts into flames, killing everyone.
[0] https://xcancel.com/brenankeller/status/1068615953989087232?...
That's just a bad dev. Good devs don't think of just the happy path. My experience of QA as a quality focused dev has not been good.
The purpose of QA is to identify the unhappy paths that the good devs missed, not to compensate for bad devs.