Many years developing games and I saw little benefit in test code but really appreciated the human testers. Now working in automotive and see massive benefit in testing my code and automated running of those tests. What I also see is that in automotive, there's a significant underinvestment in non-automated testing. Humans find weird things.

Without human testing, you're so very often testing that you're right, not testing that you're not wrong. You can only write the tests you can think of.

@fabs A key reason for test automation is to free up human testers to test more deeply. So many companies miss the point.

@fabs I also think human testers should drive/lead/guide automated testing development. This would increase their reach for finding bugs.

@meuns yeah, I tend to do this as a solo dev now. When I play with my code and find a bug, I start writing tests around it to figure out what is wrong. So that's a lot like human tester led automated tests.

I tend to do test first for things that have well defined behaviour in my head, and test after for exploration code.

@fabs Fully agree - automated tests find everything the programmer can think of, human QA finds all the things the programmer never even considered.

@fabs @meuns BDD is where this comes together. Customers, architects and testers write requirements as human-readable scenarios, which are dropped right into the repo as failing tests. The implementer's job is to turn them green.

@fabs @meuns

Yeah, that distinction between "this is what I intend" and "I wonder how it'll deal with _this_" is pretty important. I don't necessarily keep all of the exploratory tests but what I learnt from them feeds forward into the next round.

Worked in QA for 15 years, switched to dev in 2020. I really appreciate having a smart skilled human taking a second look at my code. Our team is between testers at the moment & really missing having a QA.

@JSAMcFarlane @meuns I'm still new to testing, and I can see the attraction of having test cases written in something like user story format. But doesn't this suffer from interpretation rot? The kind of design technical debt you get when people try to mirror the world they're used to in the code? What's your experience with this in practice?

@tsturm @fabs A human QA team should include hackers too. Sure, you validated all that data in the browser, but what happens when I bypass that and send erroneous/malicious values in the actual request? Does the back end just assume it's all valid? Oops.

@fabs @JSAMcFarlane I believe testing needs iterations like development and debugging. Rotting tests might just be an hint to iterate on them.

@alan @fabs Unfortunately, in most of the industry in 2024 you are lucky to get a QA team at all.

@charliepoole @fabs I started at Microsoft during their transition from STEs to SDETs, and saw exactly that point missed.