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Comment by ldoughty | Hacker News Reader

It's not uncommon for businesses to "realign their business strategy" in a way that fires everyone in the union...

In this case, as the parent stated, outsourcing would be a likely outcome

Yes, it's not like there aren't already third-party games testing companies in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. I'm not sure to what degree games companies use agile and devops practices though. Working with an outsourcer for QA is a sure-fire way to increase your lead times and slow down development.

I feel like qa is generally the easiest thing to outsource and will have the least impact.

Working at a very small place in house QA was absolutely impactful in being subject matter experts on what the software actually did and was supposed to do. I am not sure how you measure that.

A good QA might be even the folks that know most how system actually works and what are all the features. Your developer can end up easily work in single corner, with few happy paths. Where as QA should touch nearly all surfaces of product. And even have idea what are most of the specs.

Exactly, we had 1 to 2 QA people compared to 6 to 8 developers, roughly speaking the developers knew more about particular details of like a third of the system where QA knew all the interactions.

That's definitely a fair point. However, that knowledge should live with other members of the team and it can be helpful for QA to have less knowledge of the system. How can that be helpful ? -- so they can view the systems through the lense of a typical end user.

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