this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
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A) Yes. Large companies have entire departments dedicated to QA, and it's best not to leave QA to devs, if you can afford it. Dunno what you mean by "still," since the job never went away.
B) Okay?
Yes grasshopper.
I was a QA for over 15 years.
Then the "Agile" fad ripped through the industry and QA died.
Dunno what to tell you. I do QA for a living. I see postings all the time for QA positions in other companies, and my company has had QA for at least two decades, with the department expanding over the last three years.
I'm not claiming it's ubiquitous, but maybe you're just out of the loop.
In Agile, QA testing should be involved throughout the whole development process, with QA not just following the development, but supporting it. QA testing should be implemented early and continuously, with constant feedback to developers to ensure that any issues are fixed quickly.
Hmmm...
Which, when put to practice, means QAs become BAs, no comprehensive QA occurs, and when the code is shit because they have no actual QA support and the scope changes constantly with no firm documented requirements, the dev gets fired.
Great model for people who like to sit in meetings and complain.
Horrible model for the people who actually work.
When did you retire? Agile has been around for at least 20 years, more like 30 if you count scrum being introduced before agile was formally defined. No matter how critical I am of agile it is hardly a fad at this point
Agile was definitelly taken in with the same irrationality as fashion at some point.
It's probably the best software development process philosophy for certain environments (for example: were there are fast changing requirements and easy access to end users) whilst being pretty shit for others (good luck trying to fit it at a proceess level when some software development is outsourced to independent teams or using for high performance systems design) and it eventually mostly came out of that fad period being used more for the right things (even if, often, less that properly) and less for the wrong things.
That said the Agile as fad phase was over a decade ago.
Still working.
I stopped being able to find QA work in the early 2010s or so. Converted to BI Developer. Have not encountered a dedicated QA at any of the small assortment of jobs I have had since.
Edit: And fair, despite it being a waste of time cult mentality engineered to make developers suffer and enshitify software quality, Agile got enough Kool aid drinkers to qualify it as more than a fad.
I work at a company whose entire business model is providing QA to other companies. I work directly with some very large, public companies, and some smaller ones. Almost all of them have some form of dedicated in-house QA, which we supplement.
Bruh I'm a dev who does Agile and we still have a QA department lol
You either never worked with anything that did actual agile (to be fair, most don't) or you haven't done development in a long time if you think that.
A devout Kool aid drinker I see.
Did you buy that Kool aid with your story points?
I hear they have a competitive exchange rate to Stanley nickels.
Don't take this badly but it sounds like you've only seen a tiny slice of the software development done out there and had some really bad experiences with Agile in it.
It's perfectly understandable: there are probably more bad uses of Agile out there than good ones and certain areas of software development tend to be dominated by environments which are big bloody "amateur hour every hour of the day, every day of the year" messes, Agile or no Agile.
That does however not mean that your experience stands for the entirety of what's out there trumphing even the experience of other people who also work in QA in environments where Agile is used.
Agile made Management, who had actual Senior Designer-Developers and Technical Architects designing and adjusting actual development processes, think that they had this silver bullet software development recipe that worked for everything so they didn't need those more senior (read more expensive and unwilling to accpet the same level of exploitation as the more junior types) people anymore.
It also drove the part of the Tech Industry that relies mainly on young and inexperienced techies and management (*cough* Startups *cough*) to think they didn't need experienced techies.
As usual it turned out that "there are no silver bullets", things are more complex, Agile doesn't work well for everything and various individual practices of it only make sense in some cases (and in some are even required for the rest to work properly) whilst in others are massive wasting of time (and in some cases, the usefull-wasteful balance depends on frequency and timing), plus in some situations (outsourced development) they're extremelly hard or even impossible to pull at a project scope.
That said, I bet that what you think is "The Industry" is mainly Tech companies in the US rather than were most software development occurs: large non-Tech companies with with a high dependency of software for competitive advantage - such as Banks - and hence more than enough specific software requirements to hire vast software development departments to in-house develop custom solutions for their specific needs.
Big companies whose success depends on their core business-side employees doing their work properly care a lot more about software not breaking or even delaying their business processes (and hence hire QA to figure out those problems in new software before it even gets to the business users) than Tech companies providing software to non-paying retail users who aren't even their customers (the customers are the advertisers they sell access to the eyeballs of those users) and hence will shovel just about anything out and hopefully sort out the bugs and lousy UX/UI design through A/B testing and user bug-reports.