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Comment by landryraccoon | Hacker News Reader

Developers should be writing their own tests. If a developer thinks writing tests for his own code is a waste of time that's a red flag for me.

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Developers should be doing a lot of things. In my experience the trouble is that most developers are too optimistic and tend to neglect negative test cases. So most teams still need specialist testers to ensure acceptable quality.

Is this not a case for developer education? If developers are neglecting corner cases that's a real issue that needs to be addressed directly rather than having it be the job of someone else to clean up after them.

Fish or cut bait? Obviously I train developers on my teams to be better testers but that takes time, meanwhile we have to actually get working releases out. The testers work directly with the developers, they aren't cleaning up after them.

(And please no one tell me that I should only hire developers who are already also expert testers. I have to operate in the real world.)

Yeah, it's too hard to hire good programmers and too expensive as well. If you have the capability to teach programmers, then that's a real competitive advantage.

It's not hard to hire good programmers. There are plenty of good programmers available at the market clearing rate. However there are never any perfect programmers available anywhere at any price. Everyone has some flaws and knowledge gaps. So managers have to keep their expectations realistic.

That's why you need code reviews as well as testing. Another set of eyeballs can spot the soft spots in the testing regimen.

This is also a huge win for pair programming - code review is built in.

Careful to qualify that. Sure developers should write unit tests for their code when possible. But they should not be the ones coming up with the acceptance tests (product owner) and doing all the testing of their work (QA).

I've seen that argument several times "Why can't the developers test their work?" For the same reason professional writers have proofreaders, editors, translators, etc. Because it would be amateur not to have more than one pair of eyes and one brain looking at something. No matter how good those eyes/brain are, they'll miss things that would be obvious to someone else.

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