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virgilpyesterday at 8:48 AM4 repliesview on HN

qa has long ago merged with programming in "unified engineering". Also with SRE ("devops") and now the trend is to merge with CSE and product management too ("product mindset", forward-deployed engineers). So yeah, pretty much, that's the trend. What would you trust more - an engineer doing project management too - or a project manager doing the engineering job?


Replies

ben_wyesterday at 8:51 AM

The PMs and QAs I know would disagree with that assessment.

> What would you trust more - an engineer doing project management too - or a project manager doing the engineering job?

If one of the three, {PM, QA, coder}, was replaced by AI, as a customer I'd prefer to pick the team missing the coder. But for teams replacing two roles with AI, I'd rather keep the coder.

But a deeper problem now is, as a customer, perhaps I can skip the team entirely and do it all myself? That way, no game of telephone from me to the PM to the coder and QA and back to me saying "no" and having another expensive sprint.

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_heimdallyesterday at 1:48 PM

QA is still alive and well in many companies, including manual QA. I'm sure there's a wide range these days based on industry and scale, but you simply don't ship certain products without humans manually testing it against specs, especially if its a highly regulated industry.

I also wouldn't be so sure that programming is the hardest of the three roles for someone to learn. Each role requires a different skill set, and plenty of people will naturally be better at or more drawn to only one of those.

chaboudyesterday at 11:09 AM

From my experience with modern software and services, the actual practice of QA has plainly atrophied.

In my first gig (~30 years ago), QA could hold up a release even if our CTO and President were breathing down their necks, and every SDE bug-hunted hard throughout the programs.

Now QA (if they even exist) are forced to punt thousands of issues and live with inertial debt. Devs are hostile to QA and reject responsibility constantly.

Back to the OP, these things aren't calculable, but they'll kill businesses every time.

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wouldbecouldbeyesterday at 10:32 AM

QA merged originally out of programming.

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