What has your QA/tester team said or done for the development team that made your day (as a developer).

Question

There are lots of questions on how to improve communication between teams. One way to start is to identify what one team actually does that the other team really values and do more of that.

For example. Our QA team provided a VM for us with:

• The latest release of our server-based commercial software installed and configured (not an easy task in that an installation on-site takes at least 2 days)
• A database backup of the configured system including sample data
• an auto-install and configure application that mostly works. (with 12 install packages for the components needed, this is a big time saver)

While we still do most of our testing on our own desktops, this allows us to have a relatively clean environment we can run locally.

What has your QA team done for you lately? Conversely, what have you done for your QA team?

Answer 1

"It sucks less."

That truly made my day.

Answer 2

A good friend of mine who used to be in our QA department put together a bunch of amazing scripts with AutoIt. To me they were like gold, he would find issues, write me a script, email me the executable and I'd have a way to reproduce problems in a snap. His scripts helped me track down a memory leak that I had been (unsuccessfully) trying to track down for months.

Automated testing is a Good Thing. Oh - he has since been promoted to Software Engineer and works on my team now.

Answer 3

I'm surprised that nobody has said "My QA team found an important bug before my code got to the customer."

Answer 4

"It crashed!" - the bug we were hunting for something like several months was reproduced.