Administered by:
Many years developing games and I saw little benefit in test code but really appreciated the human testers. Now working in automotive and see massive benefit in testing my code and automated running of those tests. What I also see is that in automotive, there's a significant underinvestment in non-automated testing. Humans find weird things.
Without human testing, you're so very often testing that you're right, not testing that you're not wrong. You can only write the tests you can think of.
@fabs I also think human testers should drive/lead/guide automated testing development. This would increase their reach for finding bugs.
@meuns yeah, I tend to do this as a solo dev now. When I play with my code and find a bug, I start writing tests around it to figure out what is wrong. So that's a lot like human tester led automated tests.
I tend to do test first for things that have well defined behaviour in my head, and test after for exploration code.
Yeah, that distinction between "this is what I intend" and "I wonder how it'll deal with _this_" is pretty important. I don't necessarily keep all of the exploratory tests but what I learnt from them feeds forward into the next round.
Worked in QA for 15 years, switched to dev in 2020. I really appreciate having a smart skilled human taking a second look at my code. Our team is between testers at the moment & really missing having a QA.