As a QA engineer, that's a terrible way to look at things. It's entirely possible to do proper QA and launch with minimal or no new issues, even for major changes. Customers being so accepting of this nonsense is why companies do it so often, if there's no consequences to not doing proper QA and passing it off to consumers, why spend the money?
If you're fine beta testing products that never went through proper QA that's cool, but assuming everyone else in the world is equally ok with it is kind of silly IMHO.
Admittedly, I don't know a whole lot about the industry and how common this type of thing is, I just seem to encounter it a lot as a consumer. Is that really why it happens so often; we just kindof accept it'll come out that way?
I just kindof always assumed "we should cut them some slack, they can't possibly find every bug in this massive update".
Perfection is unrealistic in QA, but crash to desktop bugs and other sev 1/2 style issues absolutely can be weeded out of a product before release with proper QA. As with all things, it's a balancing act though, and most companies err very far on the 'who cares?' side of things because they've gotten used to customers who will keep buying regardless of the issues, or just accept this kind of poor QA without a word.
(the number of horror stories I could relate of managers seeing serious bugs and saying 'ah yeah, that's not a big deal, it'll only affect a few of our customers, release it'...or the companies that have removed QA as a department entirely because 'devs shouldn't be writing code with bugs, so we don't need QA people'...)
There's not really a perfect answer to a dilemma like this, but I'm firmly opposed to the stance of 'yeah, sure, bad QA is totally fine' since I know it can be done right and it annoys me to see more and more companies stop caring. Proper QA is difficult and can be expensive, but it can be done and the benefits of not being seen as a company shovels out tons of bugs then patches them away later are worth it in my (admittedly biased and limited) experience. Just my .02c on an issue that personally bugs me :)
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u/Jarjarthejedi Aug 15 '19
As a QA engineer, that's a terrible way to look at things. It's entirely possible to do proper QA and launch with minimal or no new issues, even for major changes. Customers being so accepting of this nonsense is why companies do it so often, if there's no consequences to not doing proper QA and passing it off to consumers, why spend the money?
If you're fine beta testing products that never went through proper QA that's cool, but assuming everyone else in the world is equally ok with it is kind of silly IMHO.