[vegetablepotpie]

This is very well said and succinctly summarizes my frustrations with QA. My experience has been that non-technical staff in technical organizations create meetings to justify their existence. I’m curious if you have advice on how to shift non-technical QA towards adopting automated testing and fewer meetings.

[blackjack_]

Hi, senior SRE here who was a QA, then QA lead, then lead automation / devops engineer.

QA engineers with little coding experience should be given simple automation tasks with similar tests and documentation/ people to ask questions to. I.e. setup a pytest framework that has a few automated test examples, and then have them write similar tests. The automated tests are just TAC (tests as code) versions of the manual test cases they should already write, so they should have some idea of what they need to do, and then google / ChatGPT/ automation engineers should be able to help them start to translate that to code.

People with growth mindsets and ambitions will grow from the support and being given the chance to do the things, while some small number will balk and not want anything to do with it. You can lead a horse to water and all that.

[phatskat]

We are in the early stages of something like this in my org. QA has been writing tests in some form for a while, and it’s mostly been at a self-led level. We have a senior engineer per-application responsible for tooling and guidance, and the QA testers have been learning Java/script (depending on the application, teams we don’t interface with are writing theirs in C# iirc). With the new year, we are starting a phased initiative to ramp up all of QA to be Software Engineers in Testing - each phase will teach and guide and impart the skills needed to be fully sufficient to write automation tests in tandem with engineers writing features.

It’s an interesting and bold initiative imo, as I’ve often worked at places that let QA do whatever felt best which is good from the standpoint of letting them work within their comfort zone, and it also means that testing will largely plateau. I haven’t seen a real push for automation _not_ come out of the engineering department personally (because I’m the one pushing it every time), though I know this place has at least done some work with various automation systems in the past.