Here’s a thought experiment for Tuesday:

No-one actually cares what your code looks like or how clean it is.

Now this might be a somewhat controversial viewpoint for me to take, given my background and experience.

But hear me out. After all, this is just a thought experiment.

As QAs, our primary focus is actually ensuring that a product meets the needs of our users [1]. Now we might often get pulled into manually testing an app, or building test frameworks, or helping improve code quality, but the very best tested application that doesn’t meet the needs of our users is a failure.

So if you spend days/weeks/months improving your code quality, or rewriting your app’s backend, or implementing microservices, or refactoring a whole bunch of functions, all without creating something that improves the lives of your users, then what’s the point? You’ve just wasted a whole bunch of time (and probably had a lot of arguments on Hacker News).

A big frustration for me is watching companies and teams of all sizes spend a lot of time talking about how they’ll implement a bunch of features, or how they’re going to do a big rewrite, or implement some new framework, without defining why they’re doing it. 99% of the time, it’s because a) they got told to build a feature by someone else or b) it’s a purely selfish exercise to scratch an itch or reduce some pain. But it’s essentially a waste of salary.

In terms of the most important things you can do:

1. Build a product that let’s your users do a job they want to do
2. Build a product that removes steps in the process of the job that your user wants to do
3. Design a beautiful/engaging product
4. Make the product scalable
5. Write clean code and infrastructure that helps you with 1-4.
6. …
7. …
8. Implement hot framework x.
9. Do a rewrite in hot language y.

But if you aren’t constantly working on at least #1 and #2, you’re dead, and everything else is pointless.

If you want to spend your time learning and building something useful, the best framework that you could implement is one that lets you get out of the building!

Why do you get out of the office? To learn what your users actually need.

So stop asking your QA to write code, or automation, or do manual tests. Get them out of the office and working out what you could be building!

[1] A lot of people would disagree with this viewpoint. Some QAs think their job is about finding bugs or breaking things. Other engineers might think that we’re just there to write and execute manual tests, or write automation frameworks. But all of this is a means to the primary job of the QA: ensuring that a user can complete the job that they want to do, no matter what context they’re in or device they use.