QA versus development

On a mailing list somewhere I was musing about why I, as a developer, always find myself annoyed at QA. And that’s not good, because QA and development are partners in making sure that what we develop comes to the customer as good as we can make it. But the problem is that development never has time to properly document what we’re doing to QA, and QA only communicates to development in the form of bug reports.

As far as I can tell, there are only N types of bug reports:

  1. annoying because you already knew about what they are reporting.
  2. annoying because you thought you were done that bit and now you have to go back to it.
  3. annoying because you know that part works and now you’ll have to drop everything to go show them how they are using it wrong.
  4. annoying because you thought that part works and now you’ll have to drop everything to have them show you how they are using it right.
  5. annoying because their bug report doesn’t give you enough detail.
  6. annoying because it goes into excruciating detail when you could tell what is wrong from the first sentence.
  7. annoying because it goes into excruciating detail about stuff you already knew, but glosses over the bit that tells you if it’s a known bug or something new.
  8. annoying because they are describing something that’s working the way it’s documented to work.
  9. annoying because they are describing something that’s working the way you want it to work, but you haven’t had time to document that behaviour yet.
  10. annoying because it’s the same bug they already logged a week ago.
  11. annoying because it’s so poorly written that you can’t tell if it’s the same problem as the one they already logged a week ago.
  12. annoying because you thought you’d fixed that last week but it’s obvious from the report that you missed something.
  13. annoying because you thought you’d fixed that last week and it’s not obvious from the report if they’re testing the new code or not.

But what it all comes down to is that QA is annoying because they’re a constant reminder that you’re not as good as you wish you were. I don’t want to be “only human”, I want to be perfect.

4 thoughts on “QA versus development”

  3. At Castle Demented, there wasn’t really anything resembling QA for the web forms and databases that we used for day-to-day business. But there was one individual who could be absolutely guaranteed to turn up a “bug” that was based on some completely strange way of using the form that no one else in the universe would have ever contemplated. And because of that individual’s unique position within the Castle, “well don’t do that” was never acceptable.

  4. You forgot this one:

    14. annoying because a trivial bug, almost a preference or suggestion rather than a true bug, gets assigned a P1 priority, with lots of overwrought text with “ASAP” and exclamation points contained in the description.

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