What are your thoughts on your employer making you test as well as develop software?

Designing tests for new features are a part of modern CI flow.

@2Fdev2Ftcsh Just to clarify I mean you are responsible for developing the software and then testing it in an environment, excluding things like unit tests.

depends. I don't mind writing low level tests like UnitTests because it's really just more code in the same language.

Chasing a coverage number seems kinda dumb to me but ok, sometimes it can be a fun challenge

Integration and E2E tests though I think should be handled by other people. For one I'm already biased since I wrote the code, I know a happy-path that will work and secondly, these are often not even written in languages I specialize in and in my case one of them is a completely custom framework the company built.

not a huge fan of that. I do enjoy good test coverage as it helps me write more stable changes, but some fall under the "should be a dedicated person" category

Oh you mean manual tests?

hmm... alright manual tests are a bit more complicated of a topic... I don't mind manual testing as long as I'm given all the tools and accesses I need to do it properly.

the obvious disadvantage is that you need to understand the software as a whole and know how to use it in depth despite only writing part of it most of the time.

the advantage though is that you get to understand the whole software, which can definitely be a plus AND when you find a bug in your flow, as a programmer you have a better chance of immediately knowing what could be wrong rather than getting a ticket from some test guy who doesn't even know how to open the console or which requests are important for you (talking about web testing here)

It's nice to have dedicated people for testing at a top level, but you can work a bit more efficiently if you can also test your own flows before it gets to QA, in some DEV environment

Doesn't phase me personally.

Sure it's a bit unreal to be expected in a lot of companies, but when you don't have a QA for said project, who else is going to test it?

I test everything (happy + some unhappy paths) in development stage anyway to minimise the back and forth, I'm responsible for deploying said projects to a staging area anyway so what's a few checks and balances before getting to production 🤷‍♂️

I don't QA every project though, but for the handful of now legacy projects no one really gives a shit about unless they actually break, it's fine.

Each dev will draw a different line in the sand though.