from Gergely Orosz | by Gergely Orosz

"What are your thoughts on QA engineering and where it's heading?" The past 9 years I've not worked with a full-time QA engineer. At places that ship multiple times a day, engineers writing automation + realtime alerting/monitoring/o11y+ DevOps replaced much of QA... 1/3

... and the only thing that is not replaced, and will never be replaced is exploratory testing. However, there are vendors who often do just as good (sometimes better) exploratory QA than fulltime employees would, especially after some time, when the job becomes boring 2/3

Now QA is not dead: there are both specialist shops that need them, slower-moving companies that rely on them, and heavily regulated industries that cannot live without them. However, I personally have seen the % of QA folks shrink vs software engineers the past decade.

And just to add on what we've shipped without fulltime QA engineers: - Skype for Web - A B2B travel service within Skyscanner - Pretty much everything at Uber, including rewriting the whole Rider app in 3 months (had extensive beta program & vendor QA for exploratory testing)