I Don't Trust My Own Code
I Don't Trust My Own Code
Recently, I had a conversation with a junior developer on my team. Let’s call him Alan. We were talking about a new notification feature that was going to be used to send reminder e-mails to potentially thousands of people if they had forgotten to enter certain data in the last month or so. Alan was...
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I was a full time test engineer / QA person for a while. My motto quickly became "nothing ever works".
Pretty much any ticket behind a static copy change would have some problem or oversight. Sometimes even those would (did you account for very narrow view ports?)
Good developers would take this feedback gracefully. "Shit, you're right, I need to account for mobile users."
Bad developers would get defensive and upset. "We barely have any mobile users (me: did you check?). Alan already approved so I'm merging. I don't want to waste time on this"
As a dev I've been on both sides to be honest. Especially when there is pressure to finish the next task. I think it needs good planning to create enough time for these things.
In the end bad devs will still shut you up about things they are not interested in fixing...
I've done a lot of "then go get approval from the stakeholder to go ahead with this bug/problem".
If product wants it out now now now they can sign off on it not working on mobile, so when their boss has a fit about it I can point to the conversation where Ryan said it was fine.
I've mostly worked at smaller companies though.
I've caught problems in code review and had to do this even.
Often it's reading it and realizing there's a complicated edge case or they missed something entirely.
Sure we can make a different ticket for that to move this along, but we're getting product to agree first.
Sure we can make a different ticket for that to move this along, but we’re getting product to agree first.
Ooof, I'm glad I never worked there.
QA's job should be to make sure the bugs are known/documented/prioritised. It should never be a roadblock that interrupts work while several departments argue over what to do with a ticket.
Seriously who cares if the current ticket is left open with a "still need to do XYZ" or it gets closed and a new one is open "need to do XYZ". Both are perfectly valid, do whichever one you think is appropriate and don't waste anyone's time discussing it.
No one cares if you leave a ticket open due to a bug or incomplete feature
Product sure as hell cares if you're going to ship a bug or incomplete feature.
Never worked at company that wasn't the case in over 15 years.
Product owns the work they ask us to do. We do their bidding.
And we certainly aren't allowed to just change the scope of tickets at our own discretion without checking in