I don’t need no stinking QA!

Have you ever intentionally skipped sending a change to QA because you were  confidant there were no issues with your %code?

I think we are all guilty of doing this from time-to-time. Have you ever been burned by this decision? Are you held to a level of responsibility so high, that if a bug were introduced by your hand and it was discovered that you bypassed QA on purpose, your job would be at risk?

I bring this up because something was brought to my attention today that left my jaw on the floor after hearing it. While I realize I’m not perfect, I take great pride in the fact that I don’t write buggy code. I think this pride is something all programmers should strive for. Apparently, not everyone shares this opinion with me.

Here is the story as told to me…

A senior programmer made a change to a mission critical piece of our application and was lobbying for bypassing QA because the change “works”. QA was persistent in wanting to understand exactly what changed because they knew something this critical MUST be tested. The programmer went so far as to give QA a demo from a development machine and said “see, it works”. QA responded with a series of questions until the programmer said “I only changed this one area of code to make this work”. QA persisted with questions and tried to throw curve balls at the programmer in an effort to get the programmer to discuss more details of the programming change. Finally, the programmers manager came buy and joined the conversation. This manager understands the importance of QA and began the discovery process.

This went on for several minutes until it was finally discovered that the programmer did not make one change to an area of code. The programmer modified 15 mission critical programs. I repeat, the programmer modified 15 mission critical programs.

It was then suggested that not only should QA be testing the programmers change, but they should also be testing all aspects of the application that relied on the 15 programs that were changed. The programmer said “Oh, yeah, I guess so”.

Have you ever made a change to 15 programs and felt comfortable with no testing? How about if they were mission critical and crucial to both your clients revenue stream and yours? Would you still be able to sleep at night knowing that you didn’t test?

By they way, this programmer is more senior than I am. Well, on paper anyway, not in practice.