alt Hacker News"Before I weigh in further, I’d like to make sure you’re familiar with the testing pyramid."
The testing pyramid is a par excellance SWE kool-aid. Someone wrote a logically-sounding blogpost about it many years ago and then people started regurgitating it without any empirical evidence behind it.
Many of us have realised that you need a "testing hourglass", not a "testing pyramid". Unit tests are universally considered useful, there's not much debate about it (also they're cheap). Integration tests are expensive and, in most cases, have very limited use. UI and API tests are extremely useful because they are testing whether the system behaves as we expect it to behave.
E.g. for a specific system of ours we have ~30k unit tests and ~10k UI/API tests. UI and API tests are effectively the living, valid documentation of how the system behaves. Those tests are what prevent the system becoming 'legacy'. UI and API tests are what enable large-scale refactors without breaking stuff.
Isolated QA should not exist because anything a QA engineer can do manually can be automated.
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everyone gets the pyramid wrong in my opinion.
the vertical axis is not test type. It is would you run the test. At the bottom are deterministic fast tests for something completely unrelated to what you are working on - but they are so easy/fast you run them anyway 'just in case'. As you move up you get tests that you more and more want to aviod running. Tests that take a long time, tests that randomly fail when nothing is wrong, tests that need some settup, tests that need some expensive license (i can't think of more now but I'm sure there are).
You want to drive everything down as far as possible, but there is value in tests that are higher so you won't get rid of it. Just remember as soon you get to the 'make would run this test but I'm skipping it for now because it is annoying' line you need a seperate process to ensure the test is eventually run - you are trading off speed now for the risk that the test will find something and it is 10x harder to fix when you get there - when a test is run all the time you know what caused the failure and can go right there, while later means you did several things and have forgotten details. 10x is an estimate, depending where in your process you put it it could be 100 or even 1000 times harder.
I’ve never encountered an initiative to “shift left” that wasn’t directly motivated by clunky, slow, unreliable and unmaintainable E2E tests. Failing earlier, especially pre-deployment, with targeted integration and contract testing is fabulous but it can’t replace rubber hitting road.
I’ve had quite a bit of success in helping my dev teams to own quality, devising and writing their own test cases, maintaining test pipelines, running bug hunts, etc. 90% of this can be attributed to treating developers as my customer, for whom I build software products which allow them to be more productive.
> because anything a QA engineer can do manually can be automated.
Looks like you never worked with a decent QA team and do not understand the full scope of quality management. They have plenty of creative tasks not aligned with other roles.
> Isolated QA should not exist because anything a QA engineer can do manually can be automated.
Well, sort of maybe, but it's not always economical. For a normal web app - yeah I guess. Depends on the complexity of the software and the environment / inputs it deals with.
And then there's explorative testing, where I always found a good QA invaluable. Sure, you can also automate that to some degree. But someone who knows the software well and tries to find ways to get it to behave in unexpected ways, also valuable.
I would agree that solid development practices can handle 80% of the overall QA though, mainly regression testing. But those last 20%, well I think about those differently.
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The testing pyramid comes from a time of desktop apps with no API and when UI tests were extremely expensive. I made 100% sense in that context, it never did in other contexts. Despite its omnipresence it had not made any sense for the vast majority of us in the past 25 years.