Professional skepticism is a dev’s best skill

Ryan Donovan (0:08)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Stack Overflow Podcast, a place to talk all things, software and technology. I'm your host, Ryan Donovan, and today we're talking about QA and testing, and why professional skepticism, which is the QA and tester's core skill, it might be the most valuable skill for all engineers. My guest for that today is David Burns, who is the chair of the W3C Browser Testing and Tools Working Group, co-editor of the WebDriver Specification, and he also heads up the Developer Advocacy and Open Source Office at BrowserStack.

Welcome to the show, David.

David Burns (0:43)

Thanks for having me, Ryan. I'm really excited to be here.

Ryan Donovan (0:46)

Before we get started, we like to get to know our guest. Tell us a little bit about how you got into software and technology.

David Burns (0:51)

I grew up in South Africa. I studied computer science in South Africa, then moved to the UK. But I was more interested in how people thought about using software, because when I was doing my computer science degree, I also did a bit of industrial psychology, because I couldn't work out if I wanted to be a psychologist or go into computers, really. And I think it set me up really nicely because I did process reengineering, which is another form of automation. And then I got into test automation, worked for a startup, started up their QA department, moved to Mozilla, was there for 10 years, working on automation and tooling to make engineers more productive. And then I've been at BrowserStack for the last six years, working on open source stuff, telling everyone how I think about QA, because there's never a right answer, but there's a right direction that we should be looking at.

And how I approach problems, trying to make sure that the web and what we see of it every day is high quality and makes us better people.

Ryan Donovan (1:53)

We've talked to a lot of people building agents, and I think one of the most interesting one was somebody who was a QA tester and they built a full SDLC stack. But it was all about the evals, right? That's the big part of agents. So QA and testing is becoming a significant part of the agent development life cycle.

David Burns (2:14)

And I think it's mostly because QA people look at things slightly different to everyone else in that they kind of focus in on like, if I were to use this, how would I benefit from it? And try apply bits of empathy that they've built up over the years from speaking to customers, things like that, and then going, oh, this doesn't feel right. Like this feels like it's loading slowly. This is working this way. Also, they're very good at kind of being able to break down systems and then go, this just is junk, right? Like, yeah, I wouldn't develop software this way. I might not need to be good at doing it, but you see enough architecture after a while where you're going, yeah, this is definitely not the right direction to be going in. Reviewing things in a different way kind of opens up new avenues because they're constantly challenging systems because the bugs are already there.

They surface them a lot better that way. And I think kind of that way becomes, especially in doing evals, AI, anything like that. You really push on that quite hard.

Ryan Donovan (3:18)

It seems like QA's testers do is sort of prove, verify. It's like, you tell me that this works and, all right, I'm going to make sure, which, as we found from some of our survey results here, people don't quite trust AI or if they do, the only trusted if they can verify it.

David Burns (3:36)

Definitely. There's also QA people tend to just double check everything that they do, from developing their software, developing their frameworks, things like that.

If people don't do it, we lead to other problems that creep up, like an example today, I got kicked out of Claude Code, my token had expired, tried to sign back in, and OAuth Redirection sent me to local hosts. I was like, okay, someone's not looked at this today, but it's been deployed very quickly. The QA thing doesn't need to be a person, it could just be you looking at it from a different light, rather than just happy path, just trusting what's coming to you all the time. We need it more now than ever before, this kind of critical thinking or kind of going back to the days of test-driven development. I still do it that way, but now I do a lot with agents to kind of help me move a lot quicker.