Maybe. Personally, I've come to think that you need the right tool for the right job.
If you spend more time writing / running tests that you would fixing the bugs they find, you may be doing it wrong. If you're writing documentation no one will read, you may be doing it wrong.
They clearly do have a place though. As for maintaining a set of requirements... I appreciate there must be some environments where what is required is well understood and relatively stable. I'm not quite sure if I should look forward to working in such a place or not!
I appreciate there must be some environments where what is required is well understood and relatively stable.
Actually there isn't. Every project, no matter how it's managed, changes as it goes on. It has to because you learn and discover things along the way. That's why maintaining and understanding project requirements and how they've changed is incredibly important. If you don't keep on top of them then you end up with a project that wanders all over the place and never finishes. Or you build something that misses out important features. Or the project costs far too much. Requirements are not tasks, or epics, or things you're working right not. They're the goals that the tasks and epics work towards.
(My first startup was a requirements management app.)
> If you spend more time writing / running tests that you would fixing the bugs they find, you may be doing it wrong.
Why should those 2 activities be compared? They do not compare: writing/running tests is about discovering the bug, not fixing it. You still need to fix it after you have done your testing activity.
The time spent writing/running tests should better be compared to the time spent in bug discovery without tests, i.e. how much you value the fact that your users are going to undergo bugs, what the consequences of the users hitting bugs are, what the process to report them is, etc.
You're right, unless you're at an extreme (zero automated testing, zero bugs found in the wild) it's much more nuanced as to what the balance is (or should be), but there is a balance.
If you spend more time writing / running tests that you would fixing the bugs they find, you may be doing it wrong. If you're writing documentation no one will read, you may be doing it wrong.
They clearly do have a place though. As for maintaining a set of requirements... I appreciate there must be some environments where what is required is well understood and relatively stable. I'm not quite sure if I should look forward to working in such a place or not!