QA Hates You

A recent presentation illustrated the rigorous quality assurance that goes on at Facebook:

Perhaps the most interesting and revealing aspect of Robert’s talk was the discussion of Facebook’s somewhat unique development process.  At the surface it appears to have the contradictory goals of: minimizing down time, scaling fast, and extremely quick code updates.  First, Facebook developers are encouraged to push code often and quickly.  Pushes are never delayed and applied directly to parts of the infrastructure.  The idea is to quickly find issues and their impacts on the rest of system and surely fixing any bugs that would result from these frequent small changes.

Second, there is limited QA (quality assurance) teams at Facebook but lots of peer review of code.

All right, they’re looking at the code and then jamming it into production as fast as they can.  And they think that is a virtue.

I’m a frequent user of Facebook, and I know how often it’s buggy.  Almost daily I encounter error messages or, more infuriatingly, the damn thing just doesn’t work.  I click Share, and the controls go away and the link/witty status/photo of my cute kitty is not actually shared.  It drives me nuttier.

So why do I use it?  Because it’s free and because it has reached a tipping point where a lot of people are using it.  So Facebook, in those regards, is sort of like Microsoft, except they’re not writing anything as complicated as an operating system for disparate hardware configurations and interoperating applications plus applications themselves.  Also, Facebook makes little pretense to quality.

I have no native affection for Facebook nor brand loyalty.  If something better comes along, which could be something as simple as something similar that works right more frequently, I’ll hop ship and leave Facebook and its bogus applications designed to get my mobile number for billing behind.

I take it back; Facebook won’t be the next Microsoft.  I think Microsoft products work well enough to keep me off of Linux or Macintosh.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 8:27 am by The Director and is filed under Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.