No More QA: Yahoo's Tech Leaders Say Engineers Are Better Off Coding With No Net (ieee.org)

Tekla Perry writes: A year ago Yahoo eliminated its test and quality assurance team, as part of project Warp Drive, its move to continuous delivery of code. The shift wasn't easy, Yahoo tech execs say, and required some "tough parenting." But the result has been fewer errors because "when you have humans everywhere, checking this, checking that, they add so much human error into the chain that, when you take them out, even if you fail sometimes, overall you are doing better." And the pain wasn't as great as expected. Yahoo's chief architect and SVP of science and technology discuss the transition.

Comments

Sounds like an MBA plan!

[Dunbal]

We were tired of being constantly bogged down by all these mistakes and bugs, so we got rid of the people who kept telling us about all the mistakes and bugs. Now our code is 100% mistake and bug free! Next step, get rid of our expensive experienced coders and replace them with cheaper outsourced coders with "equivalent" experience. We'll save so much money what could possibly go wrong? And the third and final phase of our plan is that in order to motivate our coders we will be paying a bonus that scales with the amount of code written. The more code you write, the better the bonus!

Don't you just love management?

Re: Sounds like an MBA plan!

[Junta]

While 100% was hyperbole, I think the point stands: if you remove QA then the number of *known* issues is going to go down. Whether your number of *actual* issues go down it's another matter.

I view this as the nightmare scenario, management hears words like automated testing as part of CI and then assumes automation has taken care of everything and they don't need the QA people. When the QA people's input into the issue tracker goes away, the numbers of issues in the graphs go down. Management gives themselves a pat on the back as a problematic metric has improved, without too much thought as to why.

Re: Sounds like an MBA plan!

[phantomfive]

Do you think that users' data security is the proper object of harsh lessons for coders?

If you are depending on QA to make sure user data is secure, you're going to fail. That's not what QA does, and hacking is rarely in their skillset.

When companies start caring about security, they usually start a separate team "Red Team" or something whose entire job is to try to hack and find security holes in the project. (I would argue this is not sufficient, because companies who have done this still fail. If you want secure software, it has to start from the beginning. You need to teach your programmers how to write good code, and security has to be a priority on every line of code that is written. Security can't be tacked on as an afterthought).

Do they know what QA is?

[Razed By TV]

If your QA people are adding to the problems, you are probably doing it wrong.

Money Quotes

[coop247]

Hilariously full of idiot speak:

"We forced excellence into the process"
"caused a paradigm shift in how engineers thought about problems"
"even if you fail sometimes, overall you are doing better"

Re: Oh, they re-invented Test Driven Development.

[JoeMerchant]

Where are my mod points? TDD is not the elimination of test and quality assurance, it's the procedualization / automation of it - along with driving it further forward in the product development cycle.

To do TDD, you need less (or no) QA people at the end, and more QA work in early development. If you choose to do this by firing the QA department, you probably are getting your product to market slower. If, instead, you transition the frustrated programmers who have been stuck in QA since graduating into design, implementation, and maintenance of automated tests for the project, you're probably winning big.