<story><title>Engineering Principles and Values</title><url>http://engineering.zenpayroll.com/our-engineering-values-and-principles/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>coldcode</author><text>Yet another team that seems to think the programmers should QA their own code. I learned that lesson 30 years ago, good QA people are worth their weight in gold. QA is a set of skills separate from the skills that programmers have; expecting a programmer to be good at both is asking for trouble. I never would hire an architect to wield a hammer and saw. You can&amp;#x27;t be good at everything.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>patmcguire</author><text>I used to ask in interviews if they had a QA team, because it was on the Joel on Software list &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;fog0000000043.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;fog0000000043.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I stopped asking because the answers were always some variant on &amp;quot;that encourages programmers to be lazy, because they know QA will be there to catch it&amp;quot; and because it seemed like lot of companies treated that question as a culture fit red flag. The responses were pretty hostile, like I&amp;#x27;d asked why none of the engineers were wearing suits.&lt;p&gt;I have no idea whether it&amp;#x27;s a good idea, but the current tech culture seems pretty opposed to it.</text></comment>
<story><title>Engineering Principles and Values</title><url>http://engineering.zenpayroll.com/our-engineering-values-and-principles/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>coldcode</author><text>Yet another team that seems to think the programmers should QA their own code. I learned that lesson 30 years ago, good QA people are worth their weight in gold. QA is a set of skills separate from the skills that programmers have; expecting a programmer to be good at both is asking for trouble. I never would hire an architect to wield a hammer and saw. You can&amp;#x27;t be good at everything.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>edawerd</author><text>ZenPayroll CTO here. At least for the stage that we&amp;#x27;re currently in, having high unit test coverage, high-level integration tests, a strong code-review process, and individual accountability for bugs has worked very well for us so far. So well, in fact, that we don&amp;#x27;t feel we need a dedicated QA team.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s also worth mentioning that when coming up with our values&amp;#x2F;principles, we started with the understanding they can and probably will change over time, especially as we grow. So while we don&amp;#x27;t have dedicated QA team today, we&amp;#x27;ll keep an open mind do whatever works best for us in the future.</text></comment>