> Too often devs look at QA groups as someone to whom they can offload their grunt work they don't want to do.

That's a perfectly legitimate thing to do, and doing grunt work is a perfectly legitimate job to have.

Elimination of QA jobs - as well as many other specialized white collar jobs in the office, from secretaries to finance clerks to internal graphics departments - is just false economy. The work itself doesn't disappear - but instead of being done efficiently and cheaply by dedicated specialists, it's dumped on everyone else, on top of their existing workloads. So now you have bunch of lower-skill busy-work distracting the high-paid people from doing the high-skill work they were hired for. But companies do this, because extra salaries are legible in the books, while heavy loss of productivity isn't (instead it's a "mysterious force", or a "cost disease").

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pftg 5 hours ago | parent [-]

The problem of handoffs makes this work far from cheap.

And tests are not dumb work. TDD uses them to establish clarity, helping people understand what they will deliver rather than running chaotic experiments.

Highly paid people should be able to figure out how to optimize and make code easy to change, rather than ignoring technical debt and making others pay for it.

QA is just postponing fixing the real problem - hard to change the code.

	▲	jaggederest an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The best QA people I've worked with were effective before, during, and after implementation - they worked hand in hand with me both to shape features testably, work with me on the implementation for the harness for additional testing they wanted to do beyond what was useful for development, and followed up with assistance for finding and fixing bugs and using regression tests to prevent the category of error from happening again. At the very least I want someone in QA doing end-to-end testing using e.g. a browser or a UI framework driver for non-web software, but there's so much more they do than that. In the same way I respect the work of frontend, backend, infrastructure, and security engineers, I think quality engineering is its own specialized field. I think we're all poorer for the fact that it's viewed as a dumping ground or "lesser"