Should QA exist?

TJ_FLEET

not really . but distill his knowledge into an OpenClaw.

sz4kerto

"Before I weigh in further, I’d like to make sure you’re familiar with the testing pyramid." The testing pyramid is a par excellance SWE kool-aid. Someone wrote a logically-sounding blogpost about it many years ago and then people started regurgitating it without any empirical evidence behind it. Many of us have realised that you need a "testing hourglass", not a "testing pyramid". Unit tests are universally considered useful, there's not much debate about it (also they're cheap). Integration tests are expensive and, in most cases, have very limited use. UI and API tests are extremely useful because they are testing whether the system behaves as we expect it to behave. E.g. for a specific system of ours we have ~30k unit tests and ~10k UI/API tests. UI and API tests are effectively the living, valid documentation of how the system behaves. Those tests are what prevent the system becoming 'legacy'. UI and API tests are what enable large-scale refactors without breaking stuff. Isolated QA should not exist because anything a QA engineer can do manually can be automated.

andrewstuart

Hard to believe people are asking this question in 2026. Quality is something that takes dedicated focus and lots of work. Therefore it’s a job, not an afterthought or latest priority for someone whose primary focus is not quality.

donatj

Yes. Without a doubt. I worked with a QA team for the last fifteen years until last year when they laid them all off. QA is a discrete skill in and of itself. I have never met a dev truly qualified to do QA. If you don't think this you have never worked with a good QA person. A good QA persons super power is finding weird broken interactions between features and layers where they meet. Things you would never think of in a million years. Any dingbat can test input validation, but it takes a truly talented person to ask "what if I did X in one tab, Y in another, and then Z, all with this exact timing so events overlap". I have been truly stunned at some of the issues QA has found in the past. As for time, they saved us so much time! Unless your goal is to not test at all and push slop, they are taking so much work off your plate! Beyond feature testing, when a customer defect would come in they would use their expertise to validate it, reproduce it, document the parameters and boundaries of the issue before it ever got passed on to dev. Now all that work is on us.

liampulles

I work with someone who does great QA work. They know how to rip something apart, they understand the user's non-technical perspective and approach, and they understand what edge cases to look out and they have the actual equipment to test on different physical devices (and so on). Most importantly, they have the diligence and patience to methodically test subtly different cases, which I frankly don't have. On the question of whether QA slows things down, I have to ask: slows down what? Slows down releasing something broken? Why is that something to optimize for? We should always be asking how long it takes to release the right thing (indeed I'm most productive when I can close a ticket after concluding nothing is needed).

somewhereoutth

If your product is used by humans, then it needs to be tested by humans - this cannot be automated. Those humans can be your QA people, or your customers. Perhaps your customers are happy to be testers, perhaps not. Unit tests are very expensive and return little value. Conversely, a (manual?) 'smoke test' is very cheap and returns great value - the first thing you do when updating a server for example is to check it still responds (and nothing has gone wrong in the deployment process), takes 2 seconds to do, prevents highly embarrassing downtime due to a misconfigured docker pull or whatever.

Juliate

If you care about: the consistency of your output, what you're selling to your customers, you have not much of a choice (than to control what you are shipping). Not even mentioning the potential regulatory/market and legal consequences if you don't.

thanksgiving

Of course, anyone would agree that if wishes were fishes, QAs should not exist. We would all use agile with cross-functional teams. Every single team member can do any work that may be needed. All team members can take time off any time they need to because we have full coverage and the world is a beautiful place. Of course, none of this is true in the real world. For example, just last week we had a QA essentially bring down our web application on staging environment always reproducible with a sequence of four clicks. Follow the sequence with about the proper timing and boom, exception. Should this have been caught before a single line of code was written? Yes, it should have been caught before any code was written. However, the reality is that it did not. Should this have been caught by some unit test? Integration test? End to end test? Code review? I'd argue as we barrel down a world of AI slop, we need to slow down more. We need QA more than ever.

ottoflux

100% and I’m a software developer and have been for ~30 years. Good QA people know how to find regression and bugs _that you didn’t think about_ which is the whole reason why it shouldn’t be under “engineering” and that it should exist. One of the QA people I work with currently is one of my favorite people. They don’t always make me happy (in the moment) with their bugs or with how they decide to break the software, but in the end it makes a better, more resilient product.

returnInfinity

I think social media companies don't need that Enterprise software companies selling definitely need it. Customers ask was this tested? where is the test report?

itmitica

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? If engineering owns quality, then engineering own all, up the chain. No need for anything and anybody. Which is the AI pipe dream, really. You are, in fact, with using AI, QA or coding or otherwise, externalizing services in hope the services will improve and costs will drop. Let me know how that goes without HITLs.

9wzYQbTYsAIc

> Have engineering own quality The moment that happens it will either be re-outsourced to QA anyways or quality will become a question of licensing and bonding of professional engineers

pluc

In the age of AI of course not, AI is your QA

almostdeadguy

I think the unstated (but highly prevalent) view among executives in large swathes of this industry is that they don't really care to spend any time or money on user testing or quality assurance, and if this role exists at companies it is usually under-compensated and straddles both these functions to have some party be accountable. It is sometimes a check on product teams and vision-driven executive teams who don't prototype/test their ideas (or empower their teams to do so), and sometimes a check on engineers and engineering managers who don't want to be accountable to gaps in quality.

sys_64738

Developers are liars. Why would I trust them to test their software?

ivan_gammel

There are two very important ideas in this article, which I fully agree with: QA are not the only people responsible for quality - entire team is. QA act as experts and drivers of quality management process, but they should not and are not acting alone. They should have adversarial approach which is helpful on every stage of SDLC. Thus, few more items from my list why QA is useful in every engineering organization and why every team I hire has at least one QA starting from 4-5 people: 1. Quality management is a continuous process that starts with product discovery and business requirements. Developers often assume that requirements are clear and move on to building the happy path. QA often explore requirements in depth and ask a lot of good questions. 2. QA usually have the best knowledge of the product and help product managers to understand its current behavior, when new requirements suggest to change it. 3. The same applies to product design. Good designer never leaves the team with a few annotated screens, supporting developers until the product is shipped. Design QA - the verification of conformance of implementation to design specs - can be done with QA team, which can assist with automation of design-specific tests. 4. Customer support - QA people are natural partners of customer support organization, with their knowledge of the product, existing bugs and workarounds. And just a story: on one of my previous jobs recently hired QA engineer spotted number error in an All Hands presentation. That was an immediate buy-in from founders. :)

darkwater

"Engineers sometimes exhibit an arrogance that they can do everyone else’s job," This rings so many bells that it feels like some Buddhist festival. Apply the same approach to QA, Operations, and anything outside the actual product development: when this arrogance was shared between bosses and developers, all good on their side. Now with the AI, the arrogance is staying only on the bosses' side, and we have developers freaking out.

ninjagoo

So many of these articles talk about why a particular role or type of role within an org should be there or not, but they fail to touch on the 'theory' of why or why not. This article has that same lack of foundation, and so meanders around a bit, IMHO. Any process in an organization of size will have indicators that measure output. Those indicators should typically be paired with indicators that measure the quality of the output, to ensure product or service levels. That's the theory, and the genesis of 'quality management': whether you're measuring output code or breakfasts [1] or chemicals or widgets or medicine, you need to measure the quality of the output if there are any client specifications or expectations around the output. And there are very few cases where your customers will not have any specs or expectations around your product or service. How you manage quality follows from those basics; it matters where you measure quality but it is so process dependent - earlier in the process lowers costs, but may not suffice to guarantee final quality - that quality management has to be designed around the specific process; balancing cost with benefit and requirements. How deep or specialized quality management becomes depends on the needs of the org, the size of the org, and the needs of the particular process. This is why I'm skeptical about whether broad articles like this are beneficial overall. Why and how matter, and where's the foundational discussion behind why and how? Do folks not think at the organizational/business level? Maybe not everyone is a Sheryl Sandberg :-) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Output_Management

vdnkh

I ship a very visible product which, when it breaks, generates a lot of social media angst (it's in the gaming adjacent space). So we try not to break things to the best of our ability. We have very few QA people and have whittled down that team over the past few years (DevOps was eliminated during the first round of layoffs ~2023). This was painful at first but I do think it's the way to go. We found that too much manual QA incentivizes devs writing features to throw it over the fence - why should they test more if someone else is paid to do it? Devs need to feel the pain of writing tests if their code is hard to test, and they need to be held accountable when their code blows up in production. This feedback loop is valuable in the long run. Same thing for test automation. Previously we shipped this over to our in-team DevOps people and they built complicated CI/CD setups. Losing them meant we needed to simplify our stack. Took a while and it slowed down feature development, but it was worth it. Of course you need leadership who understands this and dedicates time to building this out. In defense of DevOps, I think the landscape for automation was poor a few years back. Jenkins and Teamcity are way too complex. Github Actions (for all its warts, and there are many) is much simpler. Our pipelines are also in their own CI/CD (CDK, CodeBuild) - infrastructure as code is the key to scaling. We still have manual QA people to test things we can't automate. Usually this is for weird surfaces such as smart TVs, or for perceptual tests. I don't see this going away any time soon, but high levels of automation elsewhere drive down the need for "catch-all" manual testing.

pragmatic

Should Accounting exist? Should Legal exist? Should Facilities exist? Surely your average employee could own each of these functions.