Thread by @jpietsch

I'm a network engineer, and have familiarity with network vendor's software. I also worked at Amazon for almost 17 years. AFAIK, the different mindsets around testing and who owns quality is very different and I think is very imporant. #networking #SoftwareEngineering

I've never worked at a network vendor, but I've talked to engineers in many of them. I've also hired and worked with ex-network-vendor engineers and management. Almost every single one thinks that testing and quality are the test team's responsibility, not the software team.

At Amazon/AWS, this isn't true at all. Just like with operations, for the most part the engineers who write the code own the test and the ops. I think this approach delivers much better quality and systems that are much more operatable.

Some of the very very best, most senior, highest paid software engineers at Amazon have spent significant time building test frameworks that meant their very sophisticated systems were well tested.

There's an Amazon internal talk series, and some of my favorite talks were these very senior people talking about testing. These were the people responsible for coming up with these services and delivering them. (Almost every talk by alv.)

I wish I knew how to change the network vendors software teams to think this way. They seem to think of testing as somebody else's problem and not the area of innovation that it can and should be. It's engineering like any other engineering problem. innovate!

It's true I haven't talked to all vendors and I haven't talked to them recently, but as mentioned, I've seen ex-network-vendor engineers and they aren't different. I could be wrong. I hope so. I hope it changes.