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Comment by vox_mollis | Hacker News Reader

I worked for a company that didn't invest in QA

Where are these magical places that do invest in QA? In nearly 20 years of professional development, I've never seen an organization in which the criteria for shipping was anything other than "works for me". I have never seen an organization in which there was either budget or managerial patience for proper QA, let alone anything other than VERY basic acceptance testing.

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I once worked in an organization that has 1.5-2x QA then dev. I now work in a place which has 1 QA for every 8 devs -- and there are far less bugs here then the other.

I think the reason is proper tooling, a culture of thorough automated testing, and ownership of code.

Ownership and the resulting pride in workmanship makes a big difference.

http://www.themarysue.com/ibm-black-team/

When I worked at Microsoft many years ago they had an large QA team with equal footing to Development and Product in determining what shipped and when. This was the same for every development team I was a part of there for over 9 years. It wasn't perfect, and the ship cycles were slow, but the quality bar was set higher than what I've seen outside of Microsoft.

Healthcare. Many companies developing medical software require two layers of QA (programmer review and QA; then a separate QA team) before release. "Works for me" is not appropriate when the "me" in question is not a subject-matter expert, and the subject matter is potentially deadly.

Places where it is important that the software works.

I once worked on an enterprise product that had a QA team of 25 people.

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