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Sounds like you haven’t had a good PM or a job that supports having one. Saying it’s often some new grad is like saying there’s no point having an on shore dev

Sounds like you haven’t had a good PM or a job that supports having one. Saying it’s often some new grad is like saying there’s no point having an on shore dev team because the devs are often fresh out of university. If you continually hire terribly you’re going to have a bad result. A PM should become the subject matter expert in the product they are developing. They should be able to field questions on most every part of it, and be able to build a roadmap of features. Communicate with all teams associated with it. Having the programmers plan all features is a recipe for disaster if your product isn’t designed for developers. It’s like saying you don’t need a qa team because the developers tested it.

dickersnoodle 3y ago
>It’s like saying you don’t need a qa team because the developers tested it. Strangely enough, that's happening at a few companies (run by Amazon refugees IIRC) where they think that making devs do QA and removing QA/QE roles will speed delivery. I'm in one of those companies now, and I'm waiting for the #FAFO loop to happen.
- pdimitar 3y ago
  That really depends on what does QA entail at these companies. If it's just increasing test coverage and adding integration tests then yes, devs should be doing it. If it's just clicking UIs all day long then obviously a QA should do it. Or have an UAT environment where a few more enthusiastic customers are willing to test and report bugs.
  - dickersnoodle 3y ago
    It's more than that. In an org with an architecture of silo'd teams that all work on their own independent federated services, you'll need people to test out all of the variations on content, timing and error handling for the software as a whole. Depending on automated testing to handle all of that, in a live environment, is a fool's errand no matter how much it makes the development cycle seem to go faster.
ath3nd 3y ago
I can most certainly and confidently tell you that a dedicated QA team that only does testing is a total waste of money! A sre/platform team building fuzzy testing tools and mandating better testing practices is money much better spent. The developers MUST care for the quality, not outsource it to some external team. The desire of large corps to spend huge amount of $$$ to create artificial roles to water down ownership can never cease to astonish me. If your devs can't think of handling nulls or corner cases, you got a skill problem, and you should ASAP upskill the devs, not outsource thinking to another tea. Making quality somebody else's problem is the exact opposite of ownership! You want agile? Damn leave the devs alone, stop building walls around them and the product they are building!
- possibly_not 3y ago
  >The developers MUST care for the quality, not outsource it to some external team. The desire of large corps to spend huge amount of $$$ to create artificial roles to water down ownership can never cease to astonish me. As a former quality-focused dev, I can tell you that the industry beats it out of you with a club. There is always somebody above you who cares only about their own career ambitions and has more leverage than you do. This leads to a horde of devs who just do what they're told and not much else. Businesses are all about risk management. The safest way to de-risk a business is to water down ownership, at the cost of injuring quality-focused devs. You're only a cog. You need to only be a cog to them. They must to be able to replace you with another cog when you leave for greener pastures.
  - andrekandre 3y ago
    > I can tell you that the industry beats it out of you with a club. yep, i can say i've seen this over and over; more than anything incentives are for the next okr or whatever to be completed so they can move on to the next one asap. i've seen pr's sent out for review that literally didn't work or crashed immediately on use... as if the expectation is qa will report whatever needs fixing but thats fine cause its "in qa now" so development is "done".
    - 3y ago

dickersnoodle 3y ago

>It’s like saying you don’t need a qa team because the developers tested it. Strangely enough, that's happening at a few companies (run by Amazon refugees IIRC) where they think that making devs do QA and removing QA/QE roles will speed delivery. I'm in one of those companies now, and I'm waiting for the #FAFO loop to happen.

pdimitar 3y ago
That really depends on what does QA entail at these companies. If it's just increasing test coverage and adding integration tests then yes, devs should be doing it. If it's just clicking UIs all day long then obviously a QA should do it. Or have an UAT environment where a few more enthusiastic customers are willing to test and report bugs.
- dickersnoodle 3y ago
  It's more than that. In an org with an architecture of silo'd teams that all work on their own independent federated services, you'll need people to test out all of the variations on content, timing and error handling for the software as a whole. Depending on automated testing to handle all of that, in a live environment, is a fool's errand no matter how much it makes the development cycle seem to go faster.

ath3nd 3y ago

I can most certainly and confidently tell you that a dedicated QA team that only does testing is a total waste of money! A sre/platform team building fuzzy testing tools and mandating better testing practices is money much better spent. The developers MUST care for the quality, not outsource it to some external team. The desire of large corps to spend huge amount of $$$ to create artificial roles to water down ownership can never cease to astonish me. If your devs can't think of handling nulls or corner cases, you got a skill problem, and you should ASAP upskill the devs, not outsource thinking to another tea. Making quality somebody else's problem is the exact opposite of ownership! You want agile? Damn leave the devs alone, stop building walls around them and the product they are building!

possibly_not 3y ago
>The developers MUST care for the quality, not outsource it to some external team. The desire of large corps to spend huge amount of $$$ to create artificial roles to water down ownership can never cease to astonish me. As a former quality-focused dev, I can tell you that the industry beats it out of you with a club. There is always somebody above you who cares only about their own career ambitions and has more leverage than you do. This leads to a horde of devs who just do what they're told and not much else. Businesses are all about risk management. The safest way to de-risk a business is to water down ownership, at the cost of injuring quality-focused devs. You're only a cog. You need to only be a cog to them. They must to be able to replace you with another cog when you leave for greener pastures.
- andrekandre 3y ago
  > I can tell you that the industry beats it out of you with a club. yep, i can say i've seen this over and over; more than anything incentives are for the next okr or whatever to be completed so they can move on to the next one asap. i've seen pr's sent out for review that literally didn't work or crashed immediately on use... as if the expectation is qa will report whatever needs fixing but thats fine cause its "in qa now" so development is "done".
  - 3y ago