Geek stuff

Two Mac developers debate the big question of whether unit testing is a good thing or a waste of time.

There's lots of talk in the various comments about unit testing, white box testing, and the importance of external beta testing...all of which are very necessary, but interestingly enough (and surprisingly, given that these are professional developers), there is no mention of the importance of having professional, structured black-box QA done on software. This is more then beta testing. Closer to "professional beta testing on super-steroids" maybe.

The key thing that professional QA brings to a commercial software product is methodical, organized and documented black-box testing. Whether the actual testing itself is manual or automated (or some combination thereof) isn't as important. Testing should be done by someone who is technical, but not one of the programmers on the project. They should have deep knowledge of the product, but not actually have written any of the code. This is for the same reason that Stephen King doesn't proofread his own books.

I suspect that a significant number of software developers do not actually have any dedicated QA resources. Some probably "borrow" from tech support or rely on beta testers, but I bet if you could do a survey, most do not actually have anyone full time to do QA, which is too bad for the people who actually pay money for the software.