We’re not so different, you and I

Ben Sandofsky wrote a post about why QA departments are still necessary, specifically with regards to mobile app development. He makes a good point: mobile apps create a distribution bottleneck that makes very rapid iteration impossible. I agree, and this is a good angle to think about. I would have been happy with an article focused on this.

Ben is clearly a talented guy but this post was insane. In a literal sense. It is a rant for anti-Agile curmudgeons at best, and would leave me questioning the experiences of anyone that thinks this way at worst.

Websites ship embarrassing bugs all the time. They get away with it because they didn’t ship it to all users. You roll-out everything out to 1% of users, and watch your graphs. If things look good, slowly roll out to 100%.

The idea that this is this sort of incremental rollout is ubiquitous amongst web developers is crazy. It requires infrastructure, code designed to support split testing, experienced operations engineers, robust monitoring, a disciplined process, and more. The institutions with this sort of sophistication all have strong automated testing environments. Which brings me to my next issue:

I think automated testing accelerates development, but I haven’t seen a direct correlation between testing and quality. On projects with massive, high quality test coverage, I’ve seen just as many bugs slip through as projects with zero coverage.

This is the software equivalent to climate change denial. Where does this experience come from? I am not sure I’d be able to find a single developer who would corroborate this. Oh, right:

Tell a game developer you don’t need [QA], they’ll tell you you’re nuts.

The game industry is full of these folks who believe what they are doing is such an untestable snowflake. Unsurprisingly, games have historically been the buggiest software around. Never, ever look at game development as an example of how to do QA right. Not just automated testing, but manual QA too.

…a great QA team is far from a bunch of monkeys clicking buttons all day.

Game development has a hallmark technique of hiring masses of QA people and have massive layoffs at the end of projects. There is an entire website dedicated to tales of horror from QA people. It makes The Daily WTF look like paradise.

Take the unicorn of “two week release cycles.” As you build infrastructure for faster releases, simple code becomes unwieldy. Tasks that should take hours take weeks.

What does this even mean? There are endless apps on two week release cycles. I am confused how building infrastructure for faster iterations ends up adding complexity to simple code or tasks.

Disciplined development is a lost art.

You could make this argument when we moved away from punch cards. But the idea that success in mobile apps is achieved through discipline, but success on the web can be achieved by recklessness, is beyond baseless. It’s downright insulting.

I consider it a tragedy that, when faced with the reality of App Store distribution bottlenecks, Ben’s answer is to go back to the process of yesteryear and throw out the lessons we’ve learned. Why not invent new ways of building in quality? New ways of iterating on apps faster? There are so many interesting problems to solve.

Finally, Ben cautions:

Today, any web developer who wants to stay employed has learned to build apps. If web companies want to remain relevant, they’ll have to do the same.

I have a better warning. Don’t throw away the incredible advances we’ve made over the last decade. Don’t downplay the success and rate of innovation in web development as something that doesn’t apply. Don’t throw away the universal “good idea-edness” of automated testing. Don’t rely on a separate department to enforce quality. Don’t stop looking for ways to make development better.