If you've never worked on a development team that has

1) a separate "tester" group
2) an adversarial relationship between that testing team and developers

You don't know how thoroughly the "Agile" movement transformed software development.

It's easy to say that Agile "failed" because we immediately forget about problems that have been solved, but there really have been improvements for the daily experience of many software teams.

@nat I don’t know if I’d really lay that at “Agile”‘s feet - way back in the day, Microsoft had STE and SDET roles and orgs that were separate but non-adversarial from SDEs, and I’ve also worked with QA orgs that weren’t adversarial either!

@alpha Y'know I considered adding a "now this isn't entirely Agile" caveat, since, yeah, at minimum there are other influences. I don't know nearly enough about Microsoft's testing practice.

But what I have in mind is that when I first got into tech (in an East Coast/rust belt enterprise .NET shop) dev/tester hostility was both really normal and to some degree even celebrated as a good thing. And that's just gone now, and developers writing tests is pretty standard.

@nat Yah, I entered the workforce as an SDET at Microsoft right as they were transitioning out from having STEs, and left just before they transitioned away from SDETs as well.

@nat Though the testing discipline at MSFT was pretty advanced for the time - it was framed from my get-go as being about providing confidence levels and data/information more than “ensuring quality”, which is often how it’s described.

@alpha Yeah MSFT is one of the few places I'm aware of that ever did testing "right" especially on any kind of scale. It was the job I wanted for a while, before I found out that Pivotal and Cloud Foundry existed.

Outside of that, when I was coming up, testing-as-an-industry was just getting crushed into a fine powder between the hammer of outsourcing and the anvil of "hang on, why *don't* we expect devs to catch their own off-by-one errors?"

@alpha Well, and, the fact that basically anyone who was good at testing had at most a few years before they figured out that they could get paid like twice as much money if they switched into product development.

@nat @alpha I often wonder if the industry has _truly_ caught up with the efficiency gains handed to them by this transition. Seems a lot of the “flaccid agile” being practiced out there serves mainly to slow the product teams down so the rest of the company bureaucracy can keep up with them.

@ratkins @alpha Oh yeah absolutely not. But the industry hasn't at large has yet to catch up to a lot of transitions in the last ~10 years.

I think part of this is that you get dramatically diminishing returns on tech competence past a certain level of tech competence if you don't also have your go-to-market functions firing at that level. And GTM is genuinely pretty hard!

@nat @alpha Right. That’s my standard answer to “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”—and I have the same problem evaluating a business co-founder as they have evaluating a technical one. Sturgeon’s Law is no less a bastard for being accurate.