Developers Are Not QA Testers

When a company says “we can’t afford a QA department”, what they’re really saying is, “we accept that our software will be infested with bugs, and quality is not important to us.” When they compound this basic error by saying, “the developers will just have to do their own QA”, they prove that they have no respect for developers or QA people, and you shouldn’t work for such a company in either capacity.

(Of course, a company like that isn’t about to hire any QA testers, so you folks haven’t got the option of working for them. And I’m not a QA tester, I’m a developer. So the rest of my advice is pretty much aimed at fellow devs — but that doesn’t mean I don’t respect you QA folks. Seriously, y’all deserve a lot more respect than you get, and I love it when you make my life easier by finding my bugs for me.)

The skills, talents, and basic mindset that make a good developer are entirely different from the ones that make a good QA person. Asking one to do the other’s job is a mistake as fundamental as expecting graphic designers and accountants to swap places. Let me explain:

Developers hate repetition. We hate having to repeat anything more than once or twice; that’s why some of us become developers in the first place: because we can write programs that automate repetitive drudgery, and hence banish it from our lives.

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Originally published at Coyote Tracks. You can comment here or there.