alt Hacker NewsCouldn't agree more strongly. The best QA people have the old-school “test to break” mentality. They do weird things, like pulling the network cable out of their machine mid-transaction, or kicking off a series of performance scripts and then powering off servers in a distributed system just to see what happens.
When I got started in software, QA was already in a heavy decline. A mentor who had been a QA manager at Apple told me that being a QA person (in the industry) was once seen as a high-trust position. He was sad at what it became.
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cindyllm • yesterday at 8:50 PM
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When I got into software that employer was pretty small (50 people overall I think).
Their approach to QA was to have this be a optional thing the service people could do.
It worked surprisingly well, with the caveat that they never created regression tests.
The employer eventually switched someone from that team to establish these regression tests full time, but they had no programming experience and by the time I left no real progress was done in around 6 month. No idea what came of that, and a few years later they fired a lot of the team