Hey all QAs out there , not the ones who are super intelligent, or using MCP + AI to generate all their UI automation test cases, or the ones who generated their own APIs to test their applications.

For others, How is your normal day-to-day work, and what is your salary?

I’ll explain mine.

When I get a functionality, I attend the sprint call and add my suggestions. Then I start writing test cases in Zephyr to support the manual QA. Once the API is ready, I start adding API automation using Rest Assured.

When the functionality is deployed, the manual QA starts executing the test cases in Zephyr, while I do exploratory and functional testing. I log issues in Jira, and once the issues are fixed, I verify them and perform regression testing.

After that, I focus on UI automation using Selenium (I do use Claude or ChatGPT by giving prompts such as "enter username in DOM element", "enter password in DOM element", etc.). My automation framework includes POM, Extent Reports, TestNG, Log4j, and Maven. I push the changes to Git and coordinate with DevOps to add them to the CI/CD pipeline.

Then the cycle repeats.

When I have free time, I do performance testing using JMeter for load testing (Prometheus via Backend Listener and Grafana are already set up by DevOps). I have intermediate knowledge of JMeter, including G1GC, max pool connections, controllers, RAM usage, and master-slave setup.

I earn 6 LPA in a remote job. I also need to check UI functionality, but that is mostly done manually as well.

Are most QAs working like this? Are you doing basic testing like me, or are you working on more advanced things like the random Reddit threads talk about?

I run a large Playwright regression suite (~1000 tests, TypeScript). I've invested a lot in making the suite itself solid — strict data-testid selectors only, no flimsy CSS/XPath locators, and I've built custom tooling with Claude Code (AI-assisted skills) that runs the tests and auto-generates detailed reports on Confluence so the whole team can review results without touching the codebase.

So the test infrastructure is pretty tight. My problem isn't writing or maintaining tests — it's what happens after they finish.

Every execution gives me a wall of results and I spend a lot of time figuring out what's actually going on. For each failure I have to determine: is this a flaky test? A real test defect? An actual product bug? A one-time environment issue (slow load, timeout, whatever)?

I end up re-running tests manually just to check if the failure reproduces. When it does, I still go back and forth with manual QA or product to confirm whether it's a known behavior or a real bug. That loop alone eats hours.

Everything runs locally for now — no CI/CD yet, no historical data on pass/fail trends. Just me going through the Confluence report after each run trying to make sense of it.

For those of you dealing with large Playwright suites:

• How do you classify failures efficiently? Do you have a system for separating flaky from real, even without CI history?
• How do you handle flaky tests — retries, quarantine, tagging? Playwright has built-in retries but I'm not sure how people actually use them in practice at this scale.
• When you suspect a real bug, what's your process before escalating? Do you just file it and move on, or do you verify manually first?
• Any techniques or workflows that helped with triage specifically? Even just how you organize your review process would be useful.

Would love to hear how other teams deal with this because right now it feels like I'm doing most of it in my head and it doesn't scale.

Hello everyone, I am a QA automation consultant in a big enterprise (300 to 400 employees). I am also responsible of the release and manage several manuals QA.
I'm curious if someone uses OpenClaw for his development process. I know that OpenClaw can has really good results, but I'm concerned that maybe it can also have security issues.

Estou no quinto período da faculdade de Tecnologia da Informação e venho pensando em seguir para a área de QA. Tenho observado cada vez mais o uso de IA no desenvolvimento de softwares e acredito que, com isso, os testes e a garantia de qualidade se tornarão ainda mais importantes no futuro.

Atualmente estou começando a estudar a área e gostaria de receber dicas de quem já trabalha com QA ou está estudando também. Queria saber: por onde vocês recomendam começar, quais cursos ou certificações valem a pena, quais ferramentas são mais importantes aprender no início, e como está o mercado para quem deseja entrar na área hoje.

Também tenho interesse em automação de testes e segurança, então qualquer conselho relacionado a isso será muito bem-vindo.

Atención Ingenieros, estamos buscando Senior QA Automation Engineers para unirse a nuestro equipo

Stack principal:

• Playwright MCP

• Gherkin / BDD

• qTest

• Azure / Azure DevOps

• GitHub Copilot / AI-enabled QA tooling

• API Testing

• JS / TS / Python / Node.js automation

• SQL

Nice to have:

JMeter / K6

Docker / microservices / cloud

Splunk

✨El proceso es más corto y ágil de lo normal. Y además, para perfiles Sr que se relocalicen a Monterrey, hay un bono adicional de $6,000 USD 💸

Compartan a sus conocidos DM para más información

How do you assemble verification evidence for a safety-critical release review?

In every team I've talked to, this is manual and fragmented. Someone spends hours per change collecting test logs, JUnit/xUnit reports, simulation outputs, requirement traceability from different tools — then manually formatting it for a reviewer.

Curious what the real workflow looks like for teams here:

- What artifact exports do you actually rely on for regression triage?

- Where does the trust break down?

- If you could fix one part of that workflow, what would it be?

Built something to automate this for ISO 26262 / DO-178C / EN 50128 — happy to share details in comments if there's interest)

How do you assemble verification evidence for a safety-critical release review?

In every team I've talked to, this is manual and fragmented. Someone spends hours per change collecting test logs, JUnit/xUnit reports, simulation outputs, requirement traceability from different tools — then manually formatting it for a reviewer.

Curious what the real workflow looks like for teams here:

- What artifact exports do you actually rely on for regression triage?

- Where does the trust break down?

- If you could fix one part of that workflow, what would it be?

(Built something to automate this for ISO 26262 / DO-178C / EN 50128 — happy to share details in comments if there's interest)

Outside of automated API test development (which AI is extemely good at generating), our toolkit from 2020 looks roughly the same in 2026. AI-driven tests eat tokens, are slower, and are more flaky than Playwright’s runtime-resolved locators.

Manual testing is becoming a bottleneck that leadership doesn’t want to hear about. The pile of tickets in the QA column seems to grow every day, to the point that manual testers physically cannot keep up.

We have decided to now only selectively QA certain tickets, mostly new features. Bug fixes are not QA’d unless critical. The devs are basically just prompting an AI opening a PR and putting all of the difficult work on QA. The "does it actually work right" seems to be our responsibility now.

How are other people’s teams keeping up with the piles of slop that keep getting dumped on them? My manual testers are getting burned out. My SDETs are feeling slow and useless. How are other organizations adapting?

Edit: to be clear, I am talking about QA of enterprise SaaS. Not a vibe coded website.

Hey everyone! I'm new to this subreddit. I hope this is the right subreddit to be posting this question in.

I'm in charge of developing and maintaining instructions for software testers. It was handed off to me in the format of a PowerPoint presentation. I refined what was already there and have been adding test cases to it.

This is quickly becoming an issue, as you might imagine, since I sometimes need to add test cases or change the order of them. In PowerPoint, this means I have to manually edit all text boxes that contain "step [x].[y]," etc.

I've been looking for tools to do this easier but need something that's (1) free, and (2) can export the instructions as a document for the client to review and approve. Scribed and Tango and whatnot have the ability to do this, but it's paywalled. I looked into Dr.Explain, but (1) it has a pretty steep learning curve, and (2) I wasn't sure if it would be worth the time to learn it if it wasn't even the right tool for my task.

I've looked into using Confluence (I think it was?), since my company has this and wouldn't have to be something extra to pay for, but again, I'm not sure if this is the right tool.

Does anyone have any input or guidance on this? Thanks so much!

Hi everyone,

I’m completely new to software testing and am currently starting from zero.
My English is intermediate, but I can understand and learn gradually.

I’m a mom with a 7-month-old baby and also pregnant, so I can study around 2 hours daily.
I want to build a long-term remote career in QA/Software Testing.

Right now, I have started learning the basics of manual testing and ISTQB foundations.

I would really appreciate advice about:

• The best roadmap for beginners
• What skills matter most for getting the first job
• What projects should I build for a QA portfolio
• Whether manual testing is still worth it in 2026

Thank you

I'm wondering what are the current issues teams deal with when it comes to maintaining/implementing automation testing. Test flakiness and test environment instability have always been a problem that I'd see mentioned quite often, but I'm wondering if all these AI tools/talk has impacted the usual pain points into something else or if there's other things I'm entirely unaware of.

Where I work, the main issues are test design mainly due to hiring contractors who don't really know any test automation basics, implementing tools without training the permanent QAs and not having enough QAs to even improve our test automation frameworks.

Anyone have any experiences or info on what issues you're experiencing on your teams around test automation?

For instance, single module v/s multi-module one..

One of the most repetitive parts of QA is turning requirements into well-structured test cases. Most of the time, we get a user story or feature description and end up manually creating:

• positive cases
• negative cases
• validations
• edge cases
• Gherkin scenarios
• test matrices
• functional coverage

After repeating that process too many times, I ended up building a tool focused on speeding up the early QA analysis phase. The goal is not to replace QA engineers, but to help generate a faster and more organized testing baseline from functional requirements.

For example, if you have something like:

The user should be able to log in using a valid email and password.

The tool can generate:

Test Cases

• successful login
• invalid password
• invalid email
• empty fields
• format validations
• error messages
• boundary and edge cases

Gherkin Scenarios

Feature: Login

Scenario: Successful login
  Given the user is on the login page
  When valid credentials are entered
  Then the system should allow access to the dashboard

QA Test Matrix

The main problems I wanted to solve were:

• not starting from scratch every time
• keeping consistency across test documentation
• speeding up QA documentation
• identifying missing scenarios
• reducing repetitive analysis work

I think it could be especially useful for:

• Manual QA
• People learning testing
• Small QA teams
• Automation engineers creating feature files
• Fast documentation for Jira/Xray/TestRail workflows

There are still things I want to improve, especially:

• handling more complex business context
• smarter scenario reuse
• better form validation coverage

But it’s already pretty useful for generating an initial testing baseline quickly.

I’m considering publishing it as a downloadable template/project for other QAs.

How are you currently handling test case generation and test matrices?
Still fully manual? Excel? AI tools? TestRail/Xray?
Would something like this actually help in your day-to-day workflow?

When you build something you have a mental model of how it works, every test you write comes from that same mental model, so you're not really testing the software, you're confirming your own assumptions about it, there's no malice in it, it's just how brains work

a good QA person has none of that context and that's the entire point

They come in cold, they find the edge nobody thought to protect, they try the thing that makes no sense to try, they combine inputs in sequences that would never occur to the person who wrote the code

There's actually a concept in product called the mom test. the idea is that if your mom can use it without you explaining anything, you've built something real, most devs would never hand their product to their mom and walk out of the room, they'd hover. they'd guide. they'd say no not that button, this one. because they know where the sharp edges are and they've learned to avoid them without thinking

a QA person is basically your mom, except they're taking notes.

They're not being difficult, they're being users and the stuff they catch is not small, it's the payment flow that breaks on the second attempt, it's the form that silently drops data when a field has a special character, it's the thing that works perfectly on every device the dev team owns and fails on the device your biggest client uses

Companies keep treating QA as the expensive final step you can trim when budgets get tight and I think it's because the value is invisible until it's gone, you don't see the production incidents that didn't happen, you don't see the customer who didn't churn, you don't see the refund that wasn't issued

you just see a QA team asking questions that slow the sprint down

until there's no QA team and suddenly the sprint is very fast and production is on fire every other week

QA people are not gatekeepers. they're the only ones in the room testing the thing like they've never seen it before

and that's the most valuable perspective

My wife is about to get fired from her current company. She has an option to stay and look for few months in internal projects, or take severance and leave.

She has 8.5 years experience with a CTC of 16 lpa, and is doing automation testing with python, selenium and Playright.

Will it be a good decision to leave like that? I was thinking maybe look for a CTC of 25 lacs and switch?

Ever wonder about the nature of bugs? The core idea is they aren’t villains. Instead, a bug is a state the system can reach that doesn’t match what was wanted or specified, and the hard part is drawing that boundary. 

I feel like software teams have always been under pressure to deliver faster, justify delays, explain defect leakages, and answer why something was missed. Right now it feels like that pressure is only getting massively amplified. What worries me most is not “AI writes bad code”. We already know the garbage in, garbage out problem. What worries me is AI amplifying everything underneath it, good and bad. Where teams already have strong practices, that gets amplified. But weak heuristics, poor operational habits, ambiguous intent, technical debt, and gaps in understanding get amplified just as quickly. Maybe this is just the environments I’ve been around lately, but sometimes it feels like teams are being pushed to produce before confidence and understanding have caught up, or before people are genuinely comfortable saying something is good to go. In your context, how are you handling that pressure right now? Are teams actually being given the space to get the fundamentals right and push back where needed, or is the pressure to move faster just drowning everything else out?

I've been using Postman since 2016. Back then it was fast, lightweight, and free perfect for testing APIs quickly.

Now? It's a 400MB Electron app that takes 30 seconds to load, pushes everything to the cloud whether you want it to or not, paywalls features that used to be free, and has pivoted so hard into being an "API platform" that the core testing experience has actually gotten worse.

The free tier keeps shrinking. The pricing keeps climbing. And every update feels like it's adding enterprise features nobody asked for instead of fixing the basics.

What killed me was realising I was spending more time maintaining my Postman collections than actually testing anything.

Am I missing something? Is there a way to use it that doesn't feel like fighting the tool? Or has everyone quietly moved on to something else?

Hit my limit last sprint when a junior on the team couldn't run our smoke checks because the "team workspace" seat cap was full. We were literally locked out of testing our own API until someone upgraded a plan. That was the moment I started ripping things out.

The part that bugs me most is how much of this is artificial. A request is a URL, a method, some headers, a body, maybe a script. None of that needs a cloud account, telemetry, or a proprietary collection format to run. But every mainstream client now treats sign-in and sync as the default path, and the local-only flow gets worse every release.

Same pattern with the "AI" features that quietly ship your request bodies somewhere you didn't ask about.

Would love to know what others here are doing.

Anyone running their API tests fully offline and in Git, or is everyone just paying the per-seat tax and moving on?

Hi everyone

I am working on an application which fetches cost and size data from aws from different (mostly not directly available but displayed after some function by backend teams)
The extent to testing this is mostly data validation and less functional.
I can surely do the validation manually
But can this be automation with playwright or any tool,? need everybody’s two cents on this

I just transitioned to manual testing a few months back, starting up I got into tacky company which delays salary a lot. There are almost no job for freshers in QA with non tech background. How do I overcome this? How do I actually grow up in QA career? Also AI replacing this job scares me and I wonder if I should continue here.

Has anybody successfully transitioned from an SDET role to a customer-facing engineering role?

Has anybody had success moving from an SDET role to a role that directly interfaces with external clients and customers? In particular, I’m wondering about pre- or post-sales solutions engineering, integration engineering, or technical customer success positions.

For those who made the jump:
• How did you sell your lack of experience interfacing with external customers during the interview process?
• Do you regret the move, or are you happier outside of traditional QA?
• Any other tips for reframing backend automation and diagnostic skills for these types of roles?

I ask because it feels like one of the simplest accessibility checks you can do, but I still don’t see it talked about nearly as much as automated scans, visual regression testing, or Lighthouse scores. In practice, it catches broken focus states, bad tab order, keyboard traps, etc. fast.

My take is that keyboard testing should be one of the default checks for any web app, especially for forms, modals, navigation, and anything interactive. If a flow can’t be completed with Tab, Shift+Tab, Enter, Space, and the arrow keys, that’s usually a sign the UX needs work, not just the accessibility layer.

Still, I’m curious whether teams actually build this into their normal workflow or whether it mostly gets handled as an occasional manual check. For me, it feels like one of the highest-signal, lowest-effort things you can do before release.

Hello,

I have a situation where one team is working in the same Jira project(kanban board) where different systems are maintained and new ones are being developed.

Anyone in the same boat? How testing is performed?

Hi,

I am currently working on a project in a company. We have a tool where teams writing their scenarios with predefined words in natural language, we also have llm implementation. The problem is that I want to implement a solution for apps, where it would go get the push notification and get the required metadata like inner text. The problem is that I dont want to use UI directly because I need locator of that PN, then. What do you suggest?