alt Hacker Newshow did misunderstanding a feature and writing pages on it help, not sure I follow the logic of why this made them a good QA person? Do you mean the features were not written well and so writing code for them was going to produce errors?
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I worked with someone a little while ago that tended to do this; point out things that weren't really related to the ticket. And I was happy with their work. I think the main thing to remember is that the following are two different things
- Understanding what is important to / related to the functionality of a given ticket
- Thoroughly testing what is important to / related to the functionality of a given ticket
Sure, the first one can waste some time by causing discussion of things that don't matter. But being REALLY good at the second one can mean far less bugs slip through.
If a QA person (presumably familiar with the product) misunderstands the point of a feature how do you suppose most users are going to fare with it?
It's a very clear signal that something is wrong with either how the feature was specified or how it was implemented. Maybe both.
In order to avoid the endless cycle with the QA person, I started doing this:
> This forced me to start making my feature proposals as small as possible. I would defensively document everything, and sprinkle in little summaries to make things as clear as possible. I started writing scripts to help isolate the new behavior during testing.
Which is what I should have been doing in the first place!