I hired a woman for senior quality assurance two weeks ago. Impressive resume, great interview, but I was met with some pseudo-sexist puzzled looks in the dev team.

Meeting today. Boss: "Why is the database cluster not working properly?"

Team devs: "We've tried diagnosing the problem, but we can't really find it. It keeps being under high load."

New QA: "It might have something to do with the way you developers write queries".

She pulls up a bunch of code examples with dozens of joins and orderings on unindexed columns, explains that you shouldn't call queries from within looping constructs, that it's smart to limit the data with constraints and aggregations, hints at where to actually place indexes, how not to drag the whole DB to the frontend and process it in VueJS, etc...

New QA: "I've already put the tasks for refactoring the queries in Asana"

I'm grinning, because finally... finally I'm not alone in my crusade anymore.

Boss: "Yeah but that's just that code quality nonsense Bittersweet always keeps nagging about. Why is the database not working? Can't we just add more thingies to the cluster? That would be easier than rewriting the code, right?"

Dev team: "Yes... yes. We could try a few more of these aws rds db.m4.10xlarge thingies. That will solve it."

QA looks pissed off, stands up: "No. These queries... they touch the database in so many places, and so violently, that it has to go to therapy. That's why it's down. It just can't take the abuse anymore. You could add more little brothers and sisters to the equation, but damn that would be cruel right? Not to mention that therapy isn't exactly cheap!"

Dev team looks annoyed at me. My boss looks even more annoyed at me. "You hired this one?"

I keep grinning, and I nod.

"I might have offered her a permanent contract"

Any got fans here? Wise words from littlefinger.

+1 if you have a spaghetti chef in your team.

Got to love QA

I forged a katana once, under the supervision of a swordsmith. Nothing super special like damascus patterning or anything, but the cutting edge was pretty sharp.

Ugh sorry, lame word jokes.

In terms of software...

Microsoft Office Ribbon (cutting edge at the time, lol). Only as a maintenance drone on a bunch of manual search-and-replace work and merge conflict resolving.

Ariane 6 family of rockets (Welding X-rays and other DICOM quality assurance).

Software for continuous flow chemistry, developing microfluidic PCBs to perform Elisa immunology assays during the Mexican flu outbreak. Idea was to eliminate the need for microplates, expensive robots, microwell washers, etc — just have blood plasma, enzymecoated nanoparticles, antigen, conjugated detection reagents and substrates flowing programmatically through a PCB with a spectrophotometer built in.

I miss old times rants...So i guess, here it goes mine:

Tomorrow is the day of the first demo to our client of a "forward-looking project" which is totally fucked up, because our "Technical Quality Assurance" - basically a developer from the '90-s, who gained the position by "he is a good guy from my last company where we worked together on sum old legacy project...".
He fucked up our marvellous, loose coupling, publish/subscribe microservice architecture, which was meant to replace an old, un-maintainable enormous monolitch app. Basically we have to replace some old-ass db stored functions.
Everyone was on our side, even the sysadmins were on our side, and he just walked in the conversation, and said: No, i don't like it, 'cause it's not clear how it would even work... Make it an RPC without loose coupling with the good-old common lib pattern, which made it now (it's the 4th 2 week/sprint, and it is a dependency hell). I could go on day and night about his "awesome ideas", and all the lovely e-mails and pull request comments... But back to business

So tomorrow is the demo. The client side project manager accidentally invited EVERYONE to this, even fucking CIO, legal department, all the designers... so yeah... pretty nice couple of swallowed company...

Today was a day, when my lead colleague just simply stayed home, to be more productive, our companys project manager had to work on other prjects, and can't help, and all the 3 other prject members were thinking it is important to interrupt me frequently...

I have to install our projects which is not even had a heart beat... not even on developer machines. Ok it is not a reeeeaaally big thing, but it is 6 MS from which 2 not even building because of tight coupling fucktard bitch..., But ok, i mean, i do my best, and make it work for the first time ever... I worked like 10 ours, just on the first fucking app to build, and deploy, run on the server, connect to db and rabbit mq... 10 FUCKING HOURS!!! (sorry, i mean) and it all was about 1, i mean ONE FUCKING LINE!

Let me explain: spring boot amqp with SSL was never tested before this time. I searched everything i could tought about, what could cause "Connection reset"... Yeah... not so helpful error message... I even have to "hack" into the demo server to test the keystore-truststore at localhost... and all the fucking configs, user names, urls, everything was correct... But one fucking line was missing...
EXCEPT ONE FUCKING LINE:
spring.rabbitmq.ssl.enabled=false # Whether to enable SSL support.

This little bitch took me 6 hours to figure out...so please guys, learn from my fault and check the spring boot appendix for default application properties, if everything is correct, but it is not working...

And of course, if you want SSL then ENABLE it...
spring.rabbitmq.ssl.enabled=true

BTW i really miss those old rants from angry devs, and i hope someone will smile on my fucking torture

My boss went full psycho. I'll save her from some shame by not posting the email.

In one email she insulted every quality assurance consultant in the company.

She is supposed to be head of assurance

I am pretty decent developer but ended up in Quality assurance :/ it hurts me when people are having awesome discussions about coding amd I am performing dumb tests.

Interviewed for a Q&A position.

Found bugs and errors on the test questions just fine.

Found broken assets and errors within the test itself outside of the questions. (Misspellings, typos, broken images, botched styling, etc.)

Didn't get hired because they thought I'd spend too much time finding bugs.

What gives?

I dont know what to feel anymore.

Got hired directly without an interview into 'Data-analytics' department in fortune 500 company. This is my first job. Got hired because this company want start a website that cost millions.

Even though I am junior, I can see that this company has no idea about software development at all. No git server, no code review, no quality assurance and no proper workflow. No senior developer to guide us (junior dev) too.

There is one 'senior' consultant that work on automation project here but he just focus on his work and don't help us directly too.

The contract is about 1 year. Still got 11 months to go :/

So first of all I'm not a dev.

I'm a software tester and my test manager is a douche, but this is not it.

Today I went to the end user place along with him to teach them how to test properly and how to manage the software test cycle in JIRA.

I did a demo and showed the users the software the dev team developed and of course there were a lot of rants about it.
Users noted down a list of things to be changed and we kept going.

By the end of the demo, my test manager started discussing the fact that I told these guys to open Bugs without test objects on Jira.

I mean, we don't have a test cycle or test cased yet but these guys found issues already, what's the point?

So here's the funny part.

He then starts telling users (which ignore testing fundaments) to create a test cycle called 'meeting of today dd/mm/yyyy" and create tests below it which were named with the names of who created them.
All of that without a logic and ignoring the fact that these tests were not tests.

I was laughing my ass off while assisting this total mess and I almost lost control.

And this is my manager.

Luckily, tomorrow is Saturday.

God I miss Stack Overflow Jobs. Put tech you want to work with, put tech you don't want to work with, get relevant results. Now? Search "frontend" in LinkedIn and you're getting "sugar production quality assurance". Fuck that noise.

A recipe to make banana bread. I had to read this twice before I realized they weren't talking about a member of the quality assurance team.

Domain at it again. Left a foo bar guys. Quality development yet again

We had today a meeting in management that ended in a discussion about prevention instead of crisis and risk management.

Or to make it bit simpler: prevention instead of treatment.

In IT / management / government, treatment is usually the way - you let the crisis happen, despite knowing it could have been prevented, and treat the damage / crisis.

Needless to say, the discussion escalated like usual.

It's funny how managers are able to put sentences like: "it's important to have quality assurance like prevention but staying within budget should be priority" (loosely translated from German, it's hard - sorry)...

You mean the budget that exploded and quadrupled in size because you dumb fuckers pay no attention to quality assurance? Or the additional cost of hardware, maintenance etc. to compensate for the fuckups regarding performance evaluation and regression testing?

"We cannot prevent everything nor anticipate everything, it's safer to deal with an estimated risk than with the unknown"...

"But we'd need to invest in ..., which reduces value"

I could give more details, but I think the point is clear... the discussion became quite heated and the longer it went on, the more I wanted to have an morphine drop with suicide option...

Why do people hate prevention so much?

Is the concept that hard to understand? You prevent things to not deal with crisis.

You invest to prevent loss.

It's just one of these weeks where the only happiness consists of tipping the delivery guy with 20 % plus and getting an honest smile.

:(

The boss wants to improve the QA by introducing GUI tests (partially non-automatic) instead of refactoring the legacy blob of application with unit and integration tests.

THIS WONT MAKE IT ANY BETTER

I really miss having a team. Don't get me wrong, right now I do what I love and I got into a position where I can actually do Quality Assurance instead of just testing and I enjoy being able to actually change things instead of just repeating what problems there are and acting surprised when the same processes produce the same bugs over and over again but I really hope that we'll interview anything else than mouthbreathers soon.

I'm aware of the fact that QA isn't sexy and that few people who could become "Software ninja Rockstars" choose to go into it but can it be that hard to find at least two or three people who can write and read code at least on a junior level and understand how web protocols work? I get the feeling my entire branch is nothing but shit talkers clicking around blindly on pages.

I just want to exchange ideas again, come up with innovative tools, tweaking processes, learning from and teaching each other while we watch the entire operation get more and more efficient.

I don't know if our QA is good enough. We were developing an app for both ios and android. I, an ios developer, told the QA guy that it will take long before uploading the app in the testflight (convert swift2 to swift3). After a week the app is now uploaded in the test flight and at the same time my partner, an android developer, uploaded the android version of the app in the play store beta. The QA guy started to raise bug issues about the android version. He wanted to fix the bugs immediately since our boss needed to upload it in the play store and appstore. The QA guy kept on complaining to my partner why the android version is buggy. Then he said something we, me and my partner, facepalm.

The QA guy said " You shouldn't convert the app to swift 3. The ios version is fine when converted why the android version is buggy. You need to revert it back to swift 2"

We sit there in silence, thinking if we pity the QA guy or laugh at him.

I love how our industry has invented such important sounding yet meaningless job titles...

Developer, software engineer, software architect, developer evangelist, dev ops engineer, systems analyst, quality assurance engineer, code monkey...

This week the QA is on vacation, so we, the developers, are testing our own code (I test my partner's code and he tests mine).

For those who are QA, I have a question: If our boss omitted something on the description of how the code has to be made, for example, filtering data from database, and one of those filters are needed but the boss forgot to tell us and, at the time of making the tests, the QA and de dev team notice this... the change that has to be made should be marked as a bug? or how would you mark it?

My ideal dev job, would be a job I can show compassion towards. A team I can be proud of and learn from. And a vibrant workspace with likeminded individuals who just want to improve themselves even if they feel their at their pinnacle.

My current office tries to make use of new technologies, we've embedded docker, vagrant, a few ci systems on an in need basis per team, and a lot of other tools.

My only real qualms are they feel indifferent towards new languages and eco systems ( Node.js, GoLang, etc ). Our web team is still using angular.js 1.x, bower, refuses to look into webpack or a new framework for our front end which is currently being bogged down by angulars dirty checking.

Our automated quality assurance team is forced to use Python for end to end testing, I've written an extensive package to make their lives easier including an entire JavaScript interface for dispatching events and properly interacting with custom DOMs outside of the scope of the official selenium bindings.

Our RESTful services are all using flask and Python, which become increasingly slow with our increase in services. I've pushed for the use of Node or GoLang with a GraphQL interface but I'm shot down consistently by our principle engineers who believe everything and anything must be written in Python.

I could go on, but tldr; I'm 21 and I have a ton of aspirations for web development. I'd like to believe I'm well rounded for my age, especially without any formal education. I'd love to be surrounded by individuals who want the same, to learn and architect the greatest platforms and services possible.

Back on my university internship.

I knew nothing about web dev and it was a full stack role. I was taught nothing and just sat down and ran entire solo projects for websites and web apps. Everything was down to me including client contact.

Taught nothing and had to learn the entire stack on the fly whilst trying not to get fired or lose clients. Company had no version control for these projects, no quality assurance/testing, no frameworks or anything.

The first 3 months were not a good time.

They need to make a drug that makes quality tests interesting.

But such a drug would have the side effect of making paint drying look like monkeys blowing up racecars.

when you've been moved to quality assurance, and is forced to watch hours of videos and read hours of blogs, just to keep you busy because there is no testing work but plenty of developing work to be done...

Only two people in my department and I am not the boss. Guess who gets stuck with quality assurance.

VMWare, for what you people charge, would it kill you to do some basic quality assurance on your install media?

Your flagship product, vCenter Server, has a known issue that's been there for at least eight update releases where you can't actually do the install without catching the newly provisioned appliance VM on its first startup, doing init=/bin/bash, and changing the root password by hand.

Because, yknow, having stuff work according to your docs is for *wimps*. Engineers who have to put up with this shit have the ears of their execs, and you can bet poor quality like this will eventually reach the ears of the people with purchasing authority.

Worst enterprise software experience... I was fresh out of college, and needed money. I was working in a call center, fielding IT helpdesk calls for a major US telecom company, who had just acquired a competitor. One day I got to work and about ten of us were given a new desk, new phone number, an an email address at the newly acquired company. My manager said to us "We have no clue how any of their proprietary systems work, what servers they run on, or how to login to them. Your phones are ringing, make sure you take good notes so the Tier-1s can help out next week. Good luck."

Trial by shit-storm fire, all while trying to convince the caller that yes, I did know what I was talking about. It was a lot of cold calling random employees whose job title in the corporate directory looked even remotely close to somebody I could escalate a ticket to. They didn't use the same ticketing system we used, so it was a lot of copy/pasting between two ticketing systems. To this day, I still have no clue what happened to their original call center staff. I'm sure they must have had one, but it seemingly just dissolved overnight.

That job was the springboard to my development career. I left for a gig in software helpdesk, then to quality assurance, automated testing, and now I'm a senior DevOps engineer. It was worth it.

When you end up running support queries and QA as a developer because the client's on site support team blame the provider instead of their half-assed user configuration job. #IHopeYouGetFiredAssholes

In the kingdom of aws reigns the Owner of Products.
In his court many a vassal noble (or a "sre" as they are often called) delivers their tribute.
Wise ministers (called "analysts" in these here parts) advice the Owner of Products on how to instruct his sres and where to lead the kingdom.
Needless to say, in the court the blabber is endless and the egos of the courtiers, deservedly or not, are even larger.

But there is but one member of the court, leader of none but master of japes, who dares to mock not just the courtiers, but even the Owner of Products.
Tester the Jester, from the houses of Operations Research and Quality Assurance.

There is a unique relationship between a ruler and his jester. The jester mocks the ruler, with the most outlandish of propositions, with the most malicious interpretations of the ruler's orders, evidencing the most absurd (but mathematically viable) results of a plan.
The jester makes ridicule of the ruler's edicts... so that the Owner of Products may remain humble, without need to defer to any upstart courtier.
And, in a more subtile manner, the jester prevents any courtier from maliciously complying with the edicts of the ruler.
For all in the court have heard how the lowest among them voiced the preposterous interpretation... And dare not show themselves to be even lower.

TL;DR had an all-hands meeting of tech leaders with the allmighty PO. In the meeting there is this bloke who apparently spends all his time just fucking with the bigwigs' ideas. Dude is a department of one. It seems that his whole job is being an outlandish scenario simulator & sarcasm artist. I now have way more respect for this place.

- "Two months" training upon hire, with all the other hires too.
- Entire thing takes place in a hotel's larger room meant for small conventions or whatever.
- Brought on as Java developers, told there was Java work for all of us
- By the end of it, there wasn't
- Sit at our company's office for a month doing nothing, waiting for work
- It's summer time, 90F+ heat, and the A/C not only wasn't on most of the time, when it was on it was actually heating the building instead of cooling
- Get on a project, join the client site, takes at least a week to get a laptop, takes a month to get most of the needed accesses
- Was brought on because they needed a SQL Developer, I do not know more than basic syntax which I told them
- Project is 3 months behind already
- Really no development since Offshore handles it (poorly)
- For the first year+ of my time here I am doing nothing but manual quality assurance testing, and no development

It's hard to leave when you aren't learning

I switched from a full stack dev to quality assurance job because they offered me 2.5x my pay but now no company wants to hire me....and I really want to get into cloud now and eventually become a cloud developer, I am learning linux and have taken the AWS cloud practitioner essentials course but still not getting anything yet, any advice?

I get so happy when the Quality assurance can't detect any single bug in your application.

Yet i keep some hidden tricks that couldn't be easily detected.

I’m a Frontend developer and my wife is Quality assurance Lead. We never tend to agree on things even personal. But with time I stepped up and developed negotiation skills. Now things are getting better 🙂

Best Practices for Implementing CI/CD Pipelines in a Microservices Architecture
Hello everyone,

I'm currently working on implementing CI/CD pipelines for our microservices-based application and I'm looking for some best practices and advice. Our architecture consists of several microservices, each with its own repository and development team. We've been using Jenkins for our build automation, but we're open to exploring other tools if they offer better integration or features.

Here are a few specific areas where I need guidance:

Pipeline Design: How should we structure our CI/CD pipelines to handle multiple microservices efficiently? Should each microservice have its own pipeline, or is there a better approach?

Deployment Strategies: What deployment strategies work best for microservices to ensure zero downtime and easy rollback? We're considering blue-green deployments and canary releases, but would love to hear about your experiences.

Tool Recommendations: Are there any CI/CD tools or platforms that are particularly well-suited for microservices architectures? We're particularly interested in tools that offer good integration with Kubernetes.

Testing and Quality Assurance: How do you handle testing in a microservices environment? What types of tests do you include in your CI/CD pipelines to ensure the quality and stability of each microservice?

Monitoring and Logging: What are the best practices for monitoring and logging in a microservices setup? How do you ensure that you have visibility into the performance and issues of individual microservices?

Any insights, resources, or examples from your own implementations would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance for your help!

Has RAM quality just fallen off the deep end? I swear I remember a BSOD could mean just about anything, now it seems to be failing RAM every time.

Also, why am I troubleshooting it? I know a few programming languages, so suddenly I can fix anything plugged into a wall?

Guys, need your help. What are some interview question for junior QA? Aaand, what do I need to review? Thanks a looooot!

All I've ever done is write scripts and small utilities, but Quality Assurance sounds really fun...