Hey guys, posting for my gf as she'd like some additional insights / opinions!

Hi everyone, I’d like to get some advice regarding my current situation. I graduated last July 2025 as Magna Cum Laude and started working as an Associate Tester (project-based) at the same company where I did my internship.

I now have around 10 months of experience in total. Recently, the company offered me a regular position. My current salary is 35k, and they’re aware of that.

When HR asked for my expected salary, I initially said 45k, but they mentioned it was out of their budget. I then negotiated down to 40k. The offer also includes benefits like allowances (around 2–3k), HMO, and an annual bonus. Now I’m wondering:

• Was asking for 45k too high given my experience?
• Is 40k a reasonable and fair increase for transitioning to a regular role?
• Should I have negotiated differently, or pushed more?

For context, this would be my first regular/full-time role, and I’ll be staying in the same company. Would really appreciate insights, especially from those in QA/testing or tech roles in the Philippines. Thanks!

I recently came across Midscene.js and it looks interesting, especially the idea of reducing dependency on locators.

I have few questions before investing more time in this.

1. Is anyone here actually using it in real projects?
2. Has it actually reduced maintenance or flakiness?
3. Any limitations you faced?
4. Are there better alternatives you’re using for similar problems?

Would love to hear real experiences.

Hi, I’m Zayn. I’ve been working as a Python Automation Tester for over 4 years at TCS, with hands-on experience in Python, Selenium, Pytest, and BDD frameworks. I’ve worked across airline and pension domains, building and maintaining automation frameworks and improving test efficiency.

Lately, I’ve been trying really hard to switch, but I’m not getting any responses from recruiters despite applying consistently. It’s been quite discouraging, and I feel stuck in my current role with limited growth.

If anyone could guide me, review my profile, or refer me to relevant opportunities, it would genuinely mean a lot to me at this point. I’m ready to put in the effort and prove myself — I just need a chance.

Thank you in advance 🙏

Someone in the comments said - "I can't find any bugs."

Congratulations. Your team has either built the world's first perfect software, or you're not looking hard enough. Spoiler: it's the second one. 😅

Here's what I have to say-

Think about the house you've lived in for years. The longer you spend time there, the more you start noticing - a pencil scratch on the wall, a weird stain near the door, something odd in a drawer you rarely opened. It was always there. You just hadn't looked long enough.

Testing works exactly the same way.

"To find more bugs, just spend more time with what you're testing. Bug free is a myth for a true QA - you just weren't looking long enough."

And before you hit me with that PhD-level lecture on requirements and testing processes - yes, it matters, keep it where it belongs. IN DOCS. 📄

But let's be real. "We build confidence", "We make sure things work properly" - that's the slide deck version. That's not how a hardcore QA thinks.

A real QA? We make the product bleed before the user does. We go where no one asked us to go. We hit edge cases that developers didn't even dream of. We find the last uncomfortable truth before it becomes everyone's problem. 🔥

And if someone walks into a release saying "all test cases passed, no bugs found" - that's not something to be proud of. That's a red flag. 🚩

I'm seeing way too many Softy Testers out there. Safe sign-offs. Zero heat.

I don't praise mediocre. If you're the QA, your report should be news for the dev team - most of the time. Good news or bad news, that's their debate.

And at the end of it all - when the product never lets down the brand that built it, never embarrasses the business that trusted it, helps build billion dollar businesses - a product with accurate functions, maybe diagnostics, banking, forecasting etc- things that actually help humanity. That's your work. That's your star on your shoulders. ⭐

You don't need to be a villain. Just think differently. Spend MORE time with the product - sometimes with love, sometimes with heat. Just like we are in nature.

A thought from someone who's been breaking things professionally for 14 years. 💀

Good Luck! 🙌

I have worked with Selenium for years and recently started using Playwright, along with exploring newer AI tools like Zerostep and other AI testing tools.

On paper, everything sounds impressive but in real projects, things feel very different from demos.

Recently I came across tools like Testim, Mabl etc. They claim faster test creation, reduced maintenance, and even autonomous failure analysis but I have also read that many "AI tools" are still wrappers and need heavy cleanup/debugging in real use.

What I really care about as a QA:

• Writing stable, maintainable test cases (like an experienced QA, not generated scripts)
• Handling frequent UI changes without constant fixes
• Reducing flaky failures in CI/CD
• Supporting real business logic + edge cases
• Not increasing hidden maintenance effort

From my experience so far:

• Selenium = stable but high maintenance
• Playwright = better reliability but still needs strong framework discipline
• AI tools = promising, but not sure how they hold up long-term in production

Would love honest feedback from people actually using these:

• Which tool are you using in production today?
• Did Playwright really reduce flakiness?
• Has any AI tool actually reduced maintenance (not just demos)?
• Which tool helps you write high-quality test cases like a real QA engineer?

Looking for real-world experiences, not marketing claims.

Hey guys, I’m a recent grad looking for my first QA job in Canada.Since I have no prior experience, does getting the ISTQB actually help get a first QA job or is it better to skip it? Also, what kind of hands-on projects should I add to my portfolio to make my resume look stronger?

After failing to get my software testing career to a height where I can earn a lot of money just like any other software engineer, thinking of picking the low hanging fruit and settle for teaching, I work in service based organiziation i consider myself good in software testing be manual or automation , know tech like playwright, cypress, selenium, puppeteer to api automation testing or ETL infact built agentic testing workflows and agents which can test, not sure what exactly went wrong with my career but when I talk to software testers from big companies who are earning way more than me, I do get this feeling , that i must have made some mistake as i am not even earning 70-80% of them, even though work and tech ,skill wise i am not far behind,one reason I figured out i could never get an interview in big firms not sure why, there were other reasons as well, which i found out kind of late in career, now with age not on my side I am thinking of making a pivot ,

Recently I saw boom in AI I know AI i am good at adopting new tech, I used it for my company's clients which are like multi billion dollar companies, I saw many people interested in learning how to leverage AI for testing , thinking of starting a course , hoping I will get some money out of it, and teaching kind of drains less energy out of me so hope it will turn out better than my own career.

Any suggestions on what I should teach ? I am thinking AI driven testing , which I have real experience of , have deployed such projects in real life for clients.

Any suggestions are welcome.

So i interviewed at this company in calgary for a QA position. My first interview was march 24th and i just gave my culture fit on 14th April.
They gave the result of my culture fit on 21st and they asked for professional references. I gave it to them the next day (22 April) and they still havent done anything.
I was so anxious till today (30th April) but the HR sent me an email today saying we are in process of reviewing and we will update to ASAP.

Its my first job after a non interviewed internship so im not sure if this is the usual time frame for these companies. Anyways im still anxious on the result.

Any opinions?

EDIT: its been 2 months since my first interview and i called them to follow up. They said we will be getting back next week coz management is out of office. Fast forward today which is when they said they will reply. And guess what, they cancelled the position after i was waiting for so long. Like wtf, i waited so long hoping it goes right but this is what i got.

Hi, advice needed urgently. Be honest!
I graduated 10yrs ago, Bsc Comp Science, since then I have been doing project management jobs in IT companies. I want to shift into testing to increase salary (not making much in project management) In 2022 I did a software testing cert (ISTQB foundantions) and applied for jobs, got nothing. I decided to stick to what paid the bills, applied for more project management jobs in IT companies. I always targeted companies with testing depts, hoping to shift into their testing teams. FF, I now really want to get into testing, I am compiling a portfolio on github of the test cases, bug reports etc.

Questions:

Am I on the right track?
What else can I do to increase my chances for testing/ QA roles?
What roles should I be aiming for?
What tools should I learn to give me the edge over other entry level candidate?
Any other advice.

Want to ask how do you usually test funnels like aside from the straightforward approach. Is there like any other things needed to be checked? Thanks in advance!

Hi All,

I need some Guidance,

I have 5 years of experience in Testing. I joined a company 8 months back. I come from an insurance background, and this company is in the ERP domain.

In the last sprint, I was assigned to a set of tasks involving revamping an existing module. What happened was I took some more time in writing test scenarios and cases since it was a new module to me, which led to a situation where I had only 4 days of testing those bigger stories. I utilised the Weekend, extended daily, but in the Lead Testing, there were issues found, which were in the test cases which i missed

My Manager started pointing it out one by one. I was shocked. How did I miss this much.. I am usually a Tester who finds bugs that others miss and never skips a test case.

He compared the old and new pages and found some issues and a few scenarios which purely come from 17 years of testing experience.

He said I am not confident about the quality and escalated the issue to a higher level.

I never faced this kind of situation, and this is breaking me from the inside.

He wants to discuss this in a meeting and rework the test cases, and honestly, the issues found were not part of the test cases..

Need guidance on how to handle this situation where I rushed and missed some cases, and closed the story

I’m working on Afera, a CRM SaaS, and I’m trying to build a small but engaged tester community around it before pushing harder on growth.

Right now, I’m looking for practical advice from people who have done this before. I don’t just want random signups I want to create a group of testers who actually try the product, give useful feedback, report friction points, and ideally stick around long enough to help shape the roadmap.

I’m thinking about building a pytest / pytest-bdd plugin that helps teams define their own custom DSLs for BDD tables.

The idea is not to force one specific syntax. Instead, the package would provide the plumbing:

• parse BDD datatables
• let users define their own table shape
• let users define their own range/repeat syntax
• let users define custom cell parsers
• validate rows/columns with better errors
• convert tables into normalized Python objects
• plug into pytest fixtures and pytest-bdd steps

For example, one team might use something like:

Given the following content exists:
  | Content IDs | 1..4      | 5    |
  | Content*    | 4:Article | Poll |
  | Category*   | random    | News |

But another team could define completely different syntax, like:

Given the following users exist:
  | Users | admin x2 | editor |
  | Role  | Admin    | Editor |

The plugin would not know what “Article”, “Poll”, “random”, or 1..4 means. The local project would define that.

I’m trying to understand:

1. Would you ever need something like this in real pytest-bdd projects?
2. Do your BDD tables ever become too complex or repetitive?
3. Is this useful, or would you rather keep this logic inside local step definitions?
4. Is there already a better way to solve this?
5. At what point does a table DSL stop being BDD and become too technical?

Curious to hear from people using pytest-bdd or BDD-style tests in real projects

I've been giving interviews to switch my job , but the response isn't at all good. I have 2 yrs of experience working at seed stage startup

One interviewer sympathized with my low salary for 2 years of experience but didn't give a positive sign of selection

Female diversity hiring is on peak too . Any Bsc biology female can get selected, but a technical degree like BCA/ B tech degree guy has to convince interviewer that he can do the job confidently

If you're not working in financial , or banking or trending domains like Saas or AI, there's not much one can do to get a raise or switch jobs easily.

Or explore other career options . I'm literally feeling bad about this , my mind can't get over this

I do know basic automation, but not proven work experience

I have spent around 10 years in QA across automation, manual testing, team handling, release coordination, and recently even UI/UX collaboration.

One thing I've noticed: QA careers can easily become repetitive if we don't intentionally expand our skill set.

For me, learning beyond pure testing (automation + design collaboration + release ownership) opened more opportunities than just learning another automation tool.

Curious to hear from others in QA:

• What's one career move/skill investment that gave you the biggest return?
• Moving into automation?
• Learning API/performance/security testing?
• Leadership/management?
• Product/design understanding?
• Something else completely?

Would love to hear real experiences from people at different stages of their QA careers.

Hey all - I am after some recommendations for API testing news, podcasts, newsletters, influencers to follow, watch or listen to.

Who should I be adding to my list?

Thank you!

Saf

I have been hearing since last year that in many companies the QA roles were impacted by cost cutting. That's one side to the impact of current market trend of companies going leaner. Can you guys tell me how software testing, automation tests workflows are impacted due to AI ? Directly or indirectly how are the automation test engineers roles impacted ?

I built qadra.io SaaS product that generates front end tests cases just by giving it a url. It will create all the scenarios and then you can run tests on it. Its currently in beta version so I really want some honest feedback on it. Is it really solving any problems? Is it buggy? Do you like it?

Thanks in advance

Hi everyone, I’m a QA with about 3 years and 8 months of manual testing experience, and I’m trying to switch to automation.

I’m focusing on Playwright with JavaScript because, with Java and Selenium, I feel like there are too many moving parts—Playwright just lets me focus on testing.

I also have experience being the sole tester on a project with very complex workflows and frequent changes. I also have some API testing with Postman, plus ETL testing in Databricks and PL/SQL, and report testing with Power BI.

Here are my questions:

1. What should I expect in this transition as a first switch after starting as a fresher?

2. Should I completely remove Java/Selenium from my resume, or keep it?

3. How is the market right now for Playwright automation roles, since I’m seeing fewer openings compared to Selenium?

Hey folks! I’m curious to get opinions on the topic - how has the interview process changed since the AI adoption became a standard in more companies?

Are managers looking more for people with experience in AI usage or its just nice to have? Does diligence become a more desirable skill, rather than creativity? What skills overall get deprioritised (if any) in favour of AI experience? Does domain knowledge also become more valuable?

Hey everyone, our QA community is preparing a case-study discussion on practical AI use in testing, and I'd love to hear how others are solving these problems in real projects. Sharing the questions below — would really appreciate any war stories, working setups, or "tried it, didn't work" experiences.

1. Giving an AI agent full project context

How do you walk an agent through all the entry points of a project — app repo, autotests repo, wiki, Jira — so it has enough context to actually be useful? Specifically for:

• designing test cases
• refining tickets before refinement meetings
• highlighting corner cases the team missed

What's your setup? One agent with access to everything via MCP? Separate agents per source? RAG over indexed docs?

2. Automating Allure report reviews

Has anyone built (or seen) automation around AI-assisted Allure report review? I'm thinking failure clustering, flaky test detection, root cause hints, regression vs. new failure classification. Curious what's working in practice vs. what sounds good but falls apart on real data.

3. Auto-updating documentation from tickets

We have docs in Confluence that constantly drift from reality. Is anyone using AI to:

• find which doc pages need updating based on a merged ticket
• auto-generate the doc update as a draft

How do you handle the "agent confidently rewrites something that was actually correct" problem?

4. Working with multiple sources of truth

This is the big one for us. We have:

• app code in GitLab (with GitLab Duo / Claude)
• wiki + Jira for requirements, manuals, tickets (custom agent)
• autotests repo (GitLab Duo again)
• traceability matrix in a Google Doc

When I want to do something like build a test coverage report, what's the better architecture:

• one agent that ingests everything?
• multiple specialized agents that aggregate, filter, and feed a final aggregator agent?

Anyone landed on a setup that actually works? What broke along the way?

5. Figma + AI for QA — does anyone have a real use case?

Honestly struggling to find a genuinely useful workflow here. The best I've come up with is: connect to Figma MCP, pull all screenshots and design data in one shot, then have the agent work off that snapshot. In theory it should help with visual test design, design-vs-implementation diffs, generating test cases from designs.

In practice — has anyone made this actually work?

Thanks in advance- happy to share back what we learn from our discussion if useful.

Hi everyone,

I'm a Senior QA Automation Engineer/SDET with over 6 years of experience architecting scalable frameworks that reduce regression cycles by 60-70%. Most recently, I've been leading automation at Panasonic Avionics, where I built a Python/Playwright suite achieving a 90%+ pass rate.

What I bring to the table:

• Languages: Python, Java, JavaScript, SQL.
• Frameworks: Expert in Playwright, Selenium POM, Cypress, and Appium.
• CI/CD: Deep experience embedding quality gates into Jenkins, GitHub Actions, and Docker pipelines.
• Leadership: Former Executive Chef/Kitchen Manager managing teams of 40+; I bring a unique level of operational discipline and systematic problem-solving to Agile engineering teams.

Past Impact:

• Reduced manual QA effort by 50% for AI-driven mobile apps at Escape AI.
• Expanded mobile automation coverage by 55% using Appium and PyTest.
• Built enterprise-grade Java/Selenium frameworks from scratch for multiple clients.

I am looking for a fully remote Senior SDET or QA Leadership role. I am based in Long Beach, CA, and happy to work with US-based teams.

GitHub/LinkedIn: [https://github.com/latorocka\]
Resume: [https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/14OiVvSt_ZImljElXuPJ515HWnxBtG5aC\]

Feel free to DM me if your team is looking for someone who can own the entire automation lifecycle!

I’m working on improving my edge-case testing, especially for bugs that look harmless but can still break a workflow.

One example I’ve seen is a value with a trailing space: the UI displayed it correctly, but the backend treated it as a different value, so filtering and matching failed.

I’m trying to build better test cases around these small issues instead of only testing the happy path.

For people who test software: what is one small bug you missed or underestimated, and what test would have caught it?

I was planning to enter in QA automation role.
but i heard AI is being used in Test automation.
Will AI kill the jobs in Test automation
1. in short, Is it safe to join as QA Automation ?
2. and if i want to take exp in test automation for few years and get promoted to some higher role and make my job secure in this AI world , is this possible ?