alt Hacker NewsYeah I've seen both approaches. Either teams do their own QA or we have a dedicated function. Depends on the domain to some extent. Both can work. But I don't hear people saying stupid shit anymore like "QA is a cost center". When we have it, everyone understands the value.
I worked in a team with no QAs for a while - testing was done by developers and there were a lot end to end tests. It worked pretty well - I think a couple of small bugs got through, but whether a QA would have found the issues is debatable. It was for an internal system too so the cost of a defect was low anyway. I've also worked a company with no QAs in some pretty core teams and they had almost no defects either.
Currently working on some legacy stuff with no proper end to end tests and I'm very grateful for competent testers right now.