HOW QA TESTERS REALLY FEEL | Real Quotes from Real QA Testers
To all you QA managers out there, listen up. This is your chance to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth.
We dug deep into reddit, where QA testers find solace in the company of each other and collected a sample (quite a small sample, it must be noted, there’s so much more) of the pain points your testers are dealing with.
They’re probably not sharing with you what’s bothering them, right? But they do share it with their peers from the community.
So for your consideration, here’s what the good people of testing really feel.
“QA in general has a horrid problem at marketing itself… QA is a thankless job and often looked down upon by the pompous people within our industry (and this industry has a ton of them) . It doesn’t matter how good you are, you’ll always be a lesser than.” — takoyaki_museum
“We commit to the same repos as developers, work on the same sprints, have to following the same coding standards, and have the same deadlines. We are also paid less.” — CStacos
“After your fix to the test framework broke another test, you have to go back and re-fix the test you previously fixed so as to not break the other test, which was specifically depending on a certain side effect or poor presumption.” — romulusnr
“Agile. I fu$&ing hate agile. I don’t care how great it is in theory, it is never ever ever ever ever implemented correctly, and if you’re the one special snowflake that does it correctly then just wait awhile. It will fall apart. Sooner or later.” — arewar
“The extremity of automation is really getting to me too though. There are so many tools, languages, version control systems and so on that it’s become really overwhelming to me.” — Arewar (part II)
“God I completely understand the part about the constant influx of new tools languages and the rest. It seems like every time I get comfortable using something, someone up the ladder decides we need to revamp, and use the newest bestest software available, even if it’s completely useless for our needs. So frustrating.” — guesss_whooos_back
“What’s funny is that one of the worst devs I used to work with was a former QA automation engineer. I think all that dev power went to his head.” — rangineer
“Good project managers collaborate with QA. Bad ones leave you out of the loop so that you only find out about new features or schedule changes the day before a release.
I hate when I have to go around painfully dragging information out of developers and project managers.
Being treated as ‘just QA’ is the worst.” — beefofages
“The biggest pain point is politics, IMHO. For one thing, you can’t test everything. That’s a basic principle of QA. Given this, if a major bug is found out in the field, it becomes an exhausting job to explain what happened, why, and how it won’t happen again.
QA is kinda like that defensive back that gets burned on a last second touchdown. You can blame him but it’s always best to not be in that position in the first place.” — dunderball
“‘This is by design’ as the response to feedback when something just isn’t fun. It’s a tricky one.” — LiVam
*Originally appeared on the TestCraft blog.
