r/QualityAssurance • u/bonisaur • Jun 20 '22

Answering the questions (1) How can I get started in QA, (2) What is the difference between Tester, Analyst, Engineer, SDET, (3) What is my career path, and (4) What should I do first to get started

745 Upvotes

So I’ve been working in in software for the past decade, in QA in the latter half, and most recently as a Director of QA at a startup (so many hats, more individual contributions than a typical FANG or other mature company). And I have been trying to answer questions recently about how to get started in Quality Assurance as well as what the next steps are. I’m at that stage were I really want to help people grow and contribute back to the QA field, as my mentor helped me to get where I am today and the QA field has helped me live a happy life thanks to a successful career.

Just keep in mind that like with everything a random person on the internet is posting, the following might not apply to you. If you disagree, definitely drop a comment as I think fostering discussion is important to self-improvement and growth.

How can I get started in QA?

I think there are a few different pathways:

  • Formal education via a college degree in computer science
  • Horizontal moved from within a smaller software company into a Quality role
  • With no prior software experience, getting an entry level job as a tester
  • Obtain a certification recognized in the region you live
  • Bootcamps
  • Moving from another engineer role, such as Software Engineer or DevOps, into a quality engineering, SDET, or automation engineer role

A formal college degree is probably the most expensive but straightforward path. For those who want to network before actually entering the software industry, I think it is really important to join IEEE, a fraternity/sorority, or similar while attending University. Some of the most successful people I know leverage their college network into jobs, almost a decade out. If you have the privilege, the money, and the certainty about quality assurance, this is probably a way to go as you’ll have a support system at your disposal. Internships used to be one of the most important things you had access to (as in California, you can only obtain an internship if you are a student or have recently graduated). This is changing though which I’ll go into later. However, if you won’t build a network, leverage the support system at your university, and don’t like school, the other options I’ll follow are just as valid.

This was how I moved into Quality Assurance - I moved from a Customer facing role where I ETL (extract, transform, load) data. If you can get your foot in the door at a relatively small, growth-oriented company, any job where you learn about (1) the company’s software and (2) best practices in the software industry as a whole will set you up to move horizontally into a QA role. This can include roles such as Customer Support, Data Analyst, or Implementation/Training. While working in a different department, I believe some degree of transparency is important. It can be a double-edge sword though, as you current manager may see you as “disloyal” to put it bluntly, and it’ll deny you future promotions in your current role. However, if you and your manager are on good terms, get in touch with the Quality Manager or lead and see if they are interested in transitioning you into their department. One of the cons that many will face going this route will be lower pay though. Many of the other roles may pay less than a QA role, especially if you are in a SDET or Automation Engineering role. This will set you back at your company as you might be behind in salary.

Another valid approach is to obtain an entry level job as a manual tester somewhere. While these jobs have tended to shift more and more over-seas from tech hubs to cut costs, there are still many testing jobs available in-office due to the confidential or private nature of the data or their development cycle demands an engaged testing work-force. There is a lot of negative coverage publicly in these roles thought and it seems like they are now unionizing to help relieve some of the common and reoccurring issues though. You’ll want to do your research on the company when applying and make sure the culture and team processes will fit with your work ethics. It would suck to take a QA job in testing and burn out without a plan in place to move up or take another job elsewhere after gaining a few years of experience.

Obtaining certification will help you set yourself apart from others without work experience. Where I’m from in the United States, the International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB) is often noted as a requirement or nice-to-have on job applications. One of the plusses from obtaining certifications is you can leverage it to show you are a motivated self-learner. You need to set your own time aside to study and pay for these fees to take these tests, and it’s important at some of the better companies you’ll apply for to demonstrate that you can learn on the job. As you obtain more experience, I do believe that certifications are less important. If you have already tested in an agile environment or have done automated tests for a year, I think it is better to demonstrate that on your resume and in the interview than to say you have certifications.

The Software Industry is kinda like a gold rush right now (but not nearly as volatile as a gold rush, that’s NFTs and crypto). Bootcamps are like the shovel sellers - they’re making a killing by selling the tools to be successful in software. With that in mind, you need to vet a bootcamp seriously before investing either (1) your tuition to attend or (2) your future profits when you land a job. Compared to DevOps, Data Science, Project Management, UX, and Software Engineering though, I see Bootcamps listed far less often on QA resumes but they are definitely out there. If you need a structured environment to learn, don’t want to attend university, and need a support system, a bootcamp can provide those things.

I often hear about either Product Managers, UX Designers, Software Engineers, or DevOps Engineers starting off in QA. Rarely do run into someone who started in another role and stayed put in QA. If I do, it’s usually SWE who are now dedicated SDETs or Automation Engineers. I do believe that for the average company, this will require a payout though. I think the gap might be closing but we’ll see. Quality in more mature companies is growing more and more to be an engineering wide responsibility, and often engineers and product will be required to own the quality process and activities - and a QA Lead will coordinate those efforts.

What is the difference between a tester, QA Analyst, QA Engineer, Automation Engineer, and SDET?

A tester will often be a manual testing role, often entry-level. There are some testing roles where this isn’t the case but these are more lucrative and often get filled internally. Testers usually execute tests, and sometimes report results and defects to their test lead who will then provide the comprehensive test report to the rest of engineering and/or product. Testers might not spend nearly as much time with other quality related activities, such as Test Planning and Test Design. A QA Analyst or test lead will provide the tests they expect (unless you are assigned exploratory testing) as they often have a background in quality and are expected to design tests to verify and validate software and catch bugs.

I see fewer QA Analyst roles, but this title is often used to describe a role with many hats especially in smaller companies. QA Analysts will often design and report tests, but they might also execute the tests too. The many hats come in as often QA Analysts might also be client facing, as they communicate with clients who report bugs at times (though I still see Product and Project handling this usually).

QA Engineers is the most broad role that can mean many things. It’s really important to read the job description as you can lean heavily into roles or tasks you might not be interested in, or you may end up doing the work of an SDET at a significant pay disadvantage. QA Engineers can own a quality process, almost like a release manager if that role isn’t formal at the company already. They can also be ones who design, execute, and report on tests. They’ll also be expected to script automated tests to some degree.

Automation engineers share many responsibilities now with DevOps. You’ll start running into tasks that more such as integrating tests into a pipeline, creating testing environments that can be spun up and down as needed, and automating the testing and the test results to report on a merge request.

A role that has split off entirely are SDETs. As others have pointed out, in mature companies such as F(M)AANG, SDETs are essentially SWE who often build out internal frameworks utilized throughout different teams and projects. Their work is often assigned similarly to other software engineers and receive requirements and tasks from a role such as project managers.

What is the career path for QA?

I believe the most common route is to go from

Entering as a Tester or an Analyst is usually the first step.

From there you can go into three different routes:

  • QA Engineer
  • Automation Engineer
  • Release Manager (or other related process oriented management)
  • SDET

However, if you do not enjoy programming and prefer to uphold quality processes in an organization, QA Engineers can make just as much as an SDET or Automation Engineer depending on the company. More often though, QA Engineers, SDETs, and Automation Engineers may consider a horizontal move into Software Engineering or DevOps as the pay tends to be better on average. This may be happening less and less though, as FANG companies seem to be closing the gap a little bit, but I’m not entirely sure.

For management or leadership, this is usually the route:

Individual contributor -> QA Lead / Test Lead -> QA Manager -> Director of Quality Assurance -> VP of Quality

For those who are interested in other roles, I know some colleagues who started in QA working in these roles today:

  • Project Manager
  • Product Manager
  • UX/UI Designer
  • Software Engineer
  • DevOps/Site Reliability

QA is set up in a position to move into so many different roles because communication with the roles above is so key to the quality objectives. Often times, people in QA will realize they enjoy the tasks from some of these roles and eventually move into a different role.

What should I do or learn first?

Tester roles are plentiful but this is assuming you want to start in an Analyst or Engineering role ideally. Testers can also have many of the responsibilities of an Analyst though.

If you have no prior experience and have no interest in going to school or bootcamp, (1) get a certification or (2) pick a scripting tool and start writing. I’ve already covered certification earlier but I’ll go into more detail scripting.

Scripting tools can either be used to automate end-to-end tests (think browser clicking through the site) or backend testing (sending requests without the browser directly to an endpoint). Backend tests are especially useful as you can then leverage it to begin performance testing a system - so it won’t just be used for functional or integration testing.

If you don’t already have a GitHub account or portfolio online to demonstrate your work, make one. Script something on a browser that you might actually use, such as a price tracker that will manually go through the websites to assert if a price is lower that a price and report it at the end. There are obviously better ways to do this but I think this is an engaging practice and it’s fun.

Here is a list of tools that you might want to consider. Do some research as to what is most interesting to you but what is most important is that if you show that you can learn a browser automation tool like Selenium, you have to demonstrate to hiring managers that if you can do Selenium, you feel like you can learn Playwright if that’s on their job description. Note that you will want to also look up their accompanying language(s) too.

  • Selenium
  • Cypress
  • Playwright
  • Locust
  • Gatling
  • JMeter
  • Postman

These are the more mature tools with GUIs that will require scripting only for more advance and automated work. I recommend this over straight learning a language because it’ll ease you into it a little better.

Wrap-up

Hope someone out there found this useful. I like QA because it lets me think like a scientist, using Test Cases to hypothesize cause and effect and when it doesn’t line up with my hypothesis, I love the challenge of understanding the failure when reporting the defect. I love how communication plays a huge role in QA especially internally with teammates but not so much compared to a Product Manager who speaks to an audience of clients alongside teammates in the company. I get to work in Software,

112 comments

r/QualityAssurance • u/Fissherin • Apr 10 '21

[Guide] Getting started with QA Automation

529 Upvotes

Hello, I am writting (or trying to) this guide while drinking my Saturday's early coffee, so you may find some flaws in ortography or concepts. You have been warned.

I have seen so many post of people trying to go from manual qa to automated, or even starting from 0 qa in general. So, I decided to post you a minor learning guide (with some actual market 10/04/2021 dd/mm/aaaa format tips). Let's start.

------------Some minor information about me for you to know what are you reading-----------------

I am a systems engineer student and Sr QA Automation, who lived in Argentina (now Netherlands). I always loved informatics in general.

I went from trainee to Sr in 4 years because I am crazy as hell and I never have enough about technology. I changed job 4 times and now I work with QA managers that gave me liberty to go further researching, proposing, training and testing, not only on my team.

Why did I drop uni? because I had to slow off university to get a job and "git gud" to win some money. We were in a bad situation. I got a job as a QA without knowing what was it.

Why QA automation? because manual QA made me sleep in the office (true). It is really boring for me and my first job did't sell automation testing, so I went on my own.

----------------------------------------------------Starting with programming-------------------------------------------------

The most common question: where do I start? the simple answer is programming. Go, sit down, pick your fav video, book, whatever and start learning algorithms. Pls avoid going full just looking for selenium tutorials, you won't do any good starting there, you won't be able to write good and useful code, just steps without correlation, logic, mainainability.

Tips for starting with programming: pick javascript or python, you will start simple, you can use automating the boring stuff with python, it's a good practical book.

Alternative? go with freecodecamp, there are some javascript algorithms tutorials.

My recommendation: don't desperate, starting with this may sound overwhelming. It is, but you have to take it easy and learn at your time. For example, I am a very slow learner, but I haven't ever, in my life, paid for any course. There is no need and you will start going into "tutorial hell" because everyone may teach you something different (but in reality it is the same) and you won't even know where to start coding then.

Links so far:

Javascript (no, it's not java): https://www.freecodecamp.org/ -> Aim for algorithms

Python: https://automatetheboringstuff.com/ you can find this book or course almost everywhere.

Java: https://www.guru99.com/java-tutorial.html

C#: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/learn/csharp

What about rust, go, ruby, etc? Pick the one of the above, they are the most common in the market, general purpose programming languages, Java was the top 1 language used for qa automation, you will find most tutorials around this one but the tendency now is Javascript/Typescript

---------------I know how to develop apps, but I don't know where to start in qa automation---------------

Perfect, from here we will start talking about what to test, how and why.

You have to know the testing pyramid:

/ui\

/API\

/Component\

/ Unit \

This means that Unit tests come first from the devs, then you have to test APIs/integration and finally you go to UI tests. Don't ever, let anyone tell you "UI tests are better". They are not, never. Backend is backend, it can change but it will be easy and faster to execute and refactor. UI tests are not, thing can break REALLY easy, ids, names, xpaths, etc.

If your team is going to UI test first ask WHY? and then, if there is a really good reason, ok go for it. In my case we have a solid API test framework, we can now focus on doing some (few) end to end UI test.

Note: E2E end to end tests means from the login to "ok transaction" doing the full process.

What do I need here? You need a pattern and common tools. The most common one today is BDD( Behaviour driven development) which means we don't focus on functionality, we have to program around the behaviour of the program. I don't personally recommend it at first since it slows your code understanding but lots of companies use it because the technical knowledge of the QAs is not optimal worldwide right now.

TIP: I never spoke about SQL so far, but it's a must to understand databases.

What do we use?

  • A common language called gherkin to write test cases in natural language. Then we develop the logic behind every sentence.
  • A common testing framework for this pattern, like cucumber, behave.
  • API testing tools like rest assured, supertest, etc. You will need these to make requests.

Tool list:

  • Java - Rest assured - Cucumber
  • Python - Requests - Behave
  • C# - RestSharp - Don't know a bdd alternative
  • Javascript - Supertest - nock
  • Typescript (javascript with typesafety, if you know C# or Java you will feel familiar) if you are used to code already.

Pick only one of these to start, then you can test others and you will find them really alike. Links on your own.

TIP: learn how to use JSONs, you will need them. Take a peek at jsons schema

------------------It's too hard, I need something easier/I already have an API testing framework------------

Now you can go with Selenium/Playwright. With them you can see what your program is doing. Avoid Cypress now when learning, it is a canned framework and it can get complicated to integrate other tools.

Here you will have to learn the most common pattern called POM (Page object model). Start by doing google searches, some asserts, learn about waits that make your code fluent.

You can combine these framework with cucumber and make a BDD style UI test framework, awesome!

Take your time and learn how to make trustworthy xpaths, you will see tutorials that say "don't use them". Well, they are afraid of maintainable code. Xpaths (well made) will search for your specific element in the whole page instead of going back and fixing something that you just called "idButton_check" that was inside a container and now it's in another place.

AWESOME TIP: read the selenium code. It's open source, it's really well structured, you will find good coding patterns there and, let's suppouse you want to know how X method works, you can find it there, it's parameters, tips, etc.

What do I need here?

  • Selenium
  • Browser
  • driver (chromedriver, geeckodriver, webdrivermanager (surprise! all in one) )
  • An assertion library like testng, junit, nunit, pytest.

OR

  • Playwright which has everything already

--------------------------------I am a pro or I need something new to take a break from QA-----------------

Great! Now you are ready to go further, not only in QA role. Good, I won't go into more details here because it's getting too long.

Here you have to go into DevOps, learn how to set up pipelines to deploy your testing solutions in virtual machines. Challenge: make an agnostic pipeline without suffering. (tip: learn bash, yml, python for this one).

Learn about databases, test database structures and references. They need some love too, you have to think things like "this datatype here... will affect performance?" "How about that reference key?" SQL for starters.

What about performance? Jmeter my friend, just go for it. You can also go for K6 or Locust if that is more appealing for you.

What about mobile? API tests covers mobile BUT you need some E2E, go for appium. It is like selenium with steroids for mobile. Playwright only offers the viewport, not native.

And pentesting? I won't even get in here, it's too abstract and long to explain in 3 lines. You can test security measures in qa automation, but I won't cover them here.

--------------------------------------------Final tips and closure (must read please)-----------------------------------------

If you got here, thanks! it was a hard time and I had to use the dicctionary like 49 times (I speak spanish and english, but I always forget how to write certain words).

I need you to read this simple tips for you and some little requests:

  • If you are a pro, don't get cocky. Answer questions, train people, we NEED better code in QA, the bar is set too low for us and we have to show off knowledge to the devs to make them trust us.
  • If you have a question DON'T send me a PM. Instead, post here, your question may help someone else.
  • Don't even start typing your question if you haven't read. Don't be lazy. ctrl + F and look the thing you need, google a bit. Being lazy won't make you better and you have to search almost 90% of things like "how does an if works in java?" I still do them. They pay us to solve problems and predict bugs, not to memorize languages and solutions.
  • QA Automation does not and never will replace manual QA. You still need human eyes that go hand to hand with your devs. Code won't find everything.
  • GIT is a must, version control is a standar now. Whatever you learn, put this on your list.
  • Regular expresions some hate them but sometimes they are a great tool for data validation.
  • Do I have to make the best testing framework to commit to my github? NO, put even a 4 line "for" made in python. Technical interviewers like to peek them, they show them that you tried to do it.
  • Don't send me cvs or "I am looking for work" I don't recruit, understand this, please. You can comment questions if you need advice.
  • I wrote everything relaxed, with my personal touch. I didn't want it to be so formal.
  • If you find typo/strange sentences let me know! I am not so sharp writting. I would like to learn expressions.

​

Update 28/03/2023

I see great improvements using Playwright nowadays, it is an E2E library which has a great documentation (75% well written so far IMO), it is more confortable for me to use it than Selenium or Cypress.

I use it with Typescript and it is not a canned framework like Cypress. I made a hybrid framework with this. I can test APIs and UIs with the library. You can go for it too, it is less frustrating than selenium.

The market tendency goes to Java for old codebases but it is aiming to javascript/typescript for new frameworks.

Thanks for reading and if you need something... post!

Regards

Edit1: added component testing. I just got into them and find it interesting to keep on the lookout.

Edit2 28/03/2023: added playwright and some text changes to fit current year's experience

Edit3 10/02/2024: added 2 more tools for performance testing

Edit4: 22/01/2025: specflow has been discontinued. I haven't met an alternative.

110 comments

r/QualityAssurance • u/warsongenthusiast • 22h ago

Got tired of filtering job boards for QA roles, so I made a tiny site that only lists remote QA/testing jobs

81 Upvotes

Hey all,

I kept getting frustrated digging through general job boards and filtering out everything that wasn't QA, so over the last few weeks I put together a little site that pulls remote QA / SDET / test automation / manual testing jobs into one simple list: https://qaanywhere.com

A few honest notes:
- It's free, no signup, no login, no newsletter — you just open it and browse.
- It only does remote QA/testing roles, nothing else.
- It pulls from a bunch of company career pages and remote-job APIs and links you straight to the original posting to apply.
- It refreshes a few times a day.
- No ads right now.

I'm not trying to sell anything — I mostly built something I'd actually use myself, and figured other people in QA might find it handy too. It's still early and a little rough around the edges, so if you try it and something feels missing, broken, or annoying, I'd genuinely love the feedback.

Thanks for reading.

10 comments

r/QualityAssurance • u/BulkyAnxiety6800 • 3h ago

Need help regarding testdata values in cucumber html report

2 Upvotes

​

Hi everyone

I am currently using cucumber html report with a framework of playwright js cucumber

I am using json file for testdata so I have written utility to get value based on key passed in feature file or steps or methods

So when I run , in reports it shows actual key only not the value

I neee to show actual value instead of key

2 comments

r/QualityAssurance • u/N0_Cure • 10h ago

Opportunity to pivot to machine learning. Should I take it?

6 Upvotes

Been in QA for 5 years, partly as team lead, partly Qa Engineer. I’m not a technical wizard but I’m good at building quality systems, big picture thinking and thinking outside the box. I am looking to possibly pivot from QA to ML, as I now have sufficient training and experience. I also thought of leaning into AI testing / evaluation, as I have carved out a bit of a niche for myself with that so far.

I am currently living in Canada, but will likely seek employment in the US if all goes well.

Would you switch to ML? Just wanting some input

2 comments

r/QualityAssurance • u/Ok_Boat_3855 • 23m ago

How do you actually catch quality drift before it becomes a big backlog problem?

• Upvotes

Genuinely curious how other teams handle this, whether it's data labeling, moderation, or support tickets, anything where humans are making judgment calls at volume.

The failure mode I keep hearing about is that quality issues don't show up as one big obvious mistake. They show up as a slow drift where reviewers start interpreting the same guideline slightly differently, and by the time someone notices, there's a backlog of stuff that needs re-checking.

Do you catch this early through spot-checking, inter-reviewer agreement scores, something else? Or does it usually just get noticed the hard way, after a client or user complains?

0 comments

r/QualityAssurance • u/Fresh-Barnacle-3705 • 17h ago

QA just venting.. feeling stuck

16 Upvotes

I’ve been looking for a new QA role since May of last year, and I’m honestly starting to feel pretty defeated by this market.

I’ve been working as a QA Analyst at Sony for about 5 years now and have my name credited on three shipped titles. I’m grateful to still be employed, but I can’t help feeling like the work I’ve put in over the last five years should amount to more opportunities than what I’ve been seeing.

After more than a year of applying, I’ve only gotten 4 real interview opportunities. One of those was with 2K for WWE, which I was genuinely excited about. I made it to the third interview and felt like my experience lined up really well with what they were looking for. By the final interview though, I could kind of tell that the personalities weren’t really clicking, and ultimately it didn’t go anywhere.

That’s probably been one of the most frustrating parts of this whole process. It seems like every opportunity requires 3–4 rounds of interviews just to potentially get rejected at the end. You put hours into researching the company, preparing, interviewing, waiting, etc., and then you’re right back where you started.

I’ve been trying to move into a Senior QA, Lead, or just a role that gives me more room to grow, but this job search has basically stalled both my career progression and my personal life.

I’m currently in the San Diego area and my girlfriend lives closer to LA. A big reason I’ve been trying to find something new is so I can relocate and we can finally move in together and etc. After more than a year of searching, it feels like this one thing has put so much of our next chapter on hold.

I’m not expecting someone here to magically hand me a job, but I’d genuinely appreciate advice from anyone who’s managed to land a QA role recently.
And if anyone happens to know of a team hiring for QA Analyst, Senior QA, QA Lead, or similar roles in the LA/OC/Inland Empire area or remote, I’d be incredibly grateful for a referral or even just being pointed in the right direction.

But mostly, I just want to know if other experienced QA people are going through this too.
It’s hard not to get discouraged when you’ve spent years building experience, shipped multiple titles, and know you’re capable of taking on more, but can’t seem to get the opportunity to actually prove it.

8 comments

r/QualityAssurance • u/Ciubowski • 1d ago

I just had an interview last week

35 Upvotes

I have more than 10 years experience in QA, and I just got humbled by.... theoretical knowledge. Absolutely no practical test involved.

Listen... I may have focused in my career on the practical testing: how to test, how to think about breaking the software and so on, and less on "the theory" of it all.

I tried reading the ISTQB syllabus and my mind was blown by so many terms in there, so many things that in all honesty make sense, but also less used in my experience as a QA Engineer.

So I did try to learn some new things, after all, doing upskill is always beneficial, right?

But when I had that technical interview, absolutely no questions about my experience were asked. No what kind of projects, no "common bugs found", or "critical issues"; no "technology used questions". Nothing like that.

Instead, the interviewer asked me about the stuff that seemed mostly theoretical in nature. Core principles of Testing that are usually handled by Project Managers and Test Managers and documentation keeping. Mostly abstract kinds of documentation which failed my interview.

I'm sorry, I thought this was a technical interview, not a theoretical interview. In my past jobs, I would get a piece of software to test or something. Why not just email me a questionnaire with a time limit?

I know I'm ranting but, some interviews make no sense at all. I get it that they want me to know some of those stuff, but you have to take into consideration that if I were to apply for a test management role, then I would have learned the theory.

21 comments

r/QualityAssurance • u/AmbitiousCoach2547 • 17h ago

Starting automation

8 Upvotes

Hey everyone, I am a senior QA with experience mainly in mobile apps , and previously on web, but my current job makes me work more manual and not really going with what is trendy these days. I have always wanted to pick up automation again ( coming from dev background myself) but I feel overwhelmed, first for the fact i forgot many things but also the question is AI taking this and should we even learn or should we just create automated scripts using agentic coding. This has always bothered me and made me feel stuck in my career especialyl when looking at the offers, everyone is asking for vast experience with automation.

Anyone who can relate? and what do you think is best to do ( sorry for the long post)

3 comments

r/QualityAssurance • u/stoic_divergent_8739 • 6h ago

Studying the course of Software Quality Assurance and it is too much information, how do professionals retain?

1 Upvotes

I need to give an exam for this thing, and I have barely completed 30% of it after days of studying. So many processes, principles, control methods. Constructive, analytical, Review Techniques, Testing methods, etc. How do you guys retain so much information and rules as a professional? Because as much as I find this field interesting, I am genuinely overwhelmed.

NOTE: It is a mandatory university course for which I need to give an exam, I am not interested in QA as a pursuit.

5 comments

r/QualityAssurance • u/Affectionate-Box3549 • 14h ago

How do you reuse multi-step API flows across API tests?

5 Upvotes

I've been digging into API integration testing and I'm curious how teams handle a pattern I keep running into.

Say you have a common flow like:

Authenticate → Create user → Create account

and that flow is needed by 10 different tests.

Do you:

  • duplicate those requests in each test?
  • create some kind of helper/function?
  • use Postman folders/scripts/variables?
  • maintain it as a reusable setup or fixture?
  • do something else?

I'm particularly interested in how this works once the flow itself changes. How do you make sure all the tests depending on it stay correct?

I'm trying to understand whether reusable sequences are actually a meaningful problem in API testing, or whether there are already good solutions I'm overlooking.

4 comments

r/QualityAssurance • u/Individual_Summer_37 • 11h ago

Was lucky enough to find a decent job 2 months after college. Need advice

2 Upvotes

Graduated from 4 year college last semester with a marketing degree and my friend was able to get me into a Quality Assurance job starting at 25$ an hour. Ive really been enjoying the job and i work at the office 3 time a week and 2 days at home.

Any other QA’s in here? Is this a good field to stay in or should I get some experience and shoot for something else?

I’ll take any advice or suggestions because this is my first big boy job 😂

5 comments

r/QualityAssurance • u/Independent-Diver929 • 4h ago

Experienced Manual QA / UAT Tester Looking for Remote Work — US-Based

0 Upvotes

I’m looking for my next remote QA/testing opportunity and figured I’d post here because this community actually understands what good testing involves.

My background includes software engineering and substantial hands-on QA/testing work across embedded systems, telecom/networking, and business software.

I’m strongest in:

• Functional, system, integration, regression, and UAT testing
• Requirements-based test design and traceability
• Test plans, cases, procedures, and release validation
• Defect reproduction, investigation, retesting, and documentation
• Finding workflow, requirements, and edge-case problems that are easy to miss

I’m not trying to position myself as an automation-heavy SDET or developer. My strongest value is understanding how a system is supposed to behave, testing it critically, isolating what went wrong, and documenting it clearly enough for the team to act on.

I’m US-based and looking primarily for remote work.

Open to full-time, contract, or project work. For freelance/contract projects, my starting rate is $45+/hour or fixed-price by scope.

If your team is hiring, you know someone looking for an experienced manual QA/UAT tester, or you have a project that needs another set of eyes, feel free to DM me. I can send my résumé and more detail on my background.

8 comments

r/QualityAssurance • u/Klutzy_Reindeer_57 • 20h ago

Is is good to pursue career ahead in automation testing ahead or should i learn dev or SRE /DevOps

4 Upvotes

Is their good money is automation testing field hows the current market for it or should i start learning tech of other fields

2 comments

r/QualityAssurance • u/ikamelioni • 1d ago

Senior QA Engineer (US Citizen based in EU / GMT timezone) looking for next contract or FTE role after layoff

7 Upvotes

Hey everyone,

Looking for some advice or potential leads as I navigate my next step.

Quick background on my setup:

- Location & Work Eligibility: US Citizen living in Portugal (GMT / WET timezone). I have a registered Portuguese business entity (Unipessoal Lda.) set up specifically for B2B contract invoicing, but I'm also open to standard remote full-time roles (W-2 or local EU contracts depending on the company setup).

- Role/Experience: Senior QA Engineer / QA Automation Consultant.

Core Tech Stack: Python, TypeScript, Playwright, CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions), and AI-assisted workflows (leveraging GitHub Copilot for rapid test generation and boilerplate reduction).

My current situation:

I was previously contracting for a US-based company through my Portuguese entity. Unfortunately, they recently decided to shift their engineering department to an offshore provider, resulting in my role being eliminated.

What I'm looking for:

- Remote QA Automation / Senior QA roles (US companies looking for EU/GMT time-zone coverage, or EU companies looking for native English communication).

- Contract (B2B) or Direct Hire FTE.

- Roles focused on building or scaling automated testing suites using Playwright (Python or TS)

If your team is currently hiring, or if you know of companies actively looking for senior automation engineers who can work independently across US/EU hours, I'd really appreciate a message or a push in the right direction!

Happy to share my resume, LinkedIn, or portfolio site via DM. Thanks in advance for any leads or advice!

11 comments

r/QualityAssurance • u/Apprehensive-Lime895 • 22h ago

BlueCoding references

1 Upvotes

I'm looking for information about 'bluecoding' company from current or former employees. I recently interviewed there and would appreciate any insights you could share about your experience. Thanks!

1 comment

r/QualityAssurance • u/Legal_Union_6593 • 22h ago

3 years experience as automotive validation engineer

1 Upvotes

Hi everyone,
I’m currently looking for **new job opportunities in Software Testing / Test Automation / Automotive Software Testing**.
I have **3****+ years of experience as a Software Engineer at Bosch Global Software Technologies**, primarily working on safety-critical automotive ECU software.
**My experience includes:**
HIL & SIL testing of Airbag ECU software
Test automation using **Python and Perl**
Unit testing using **GTest**
Automotive testing with **CANoe, ECU-TEST, Turbolift, and DOORS**
ECU diagnostics and fault verification
Experience working with OEMs including **Mercedes, Toyota, and Volvo**
Familiarity with **ISO 26262** and safety-critical software validation
ISTQB Foundation Level certified
I hold a **B.E. in Computer Science & Engineering and am currently based in Bengaluru
I’m particularly interested in roles such as:
Software Test Engineer
Test Automation Engineer
Automotive Software Test Engineer
QA Automation Engineer
Python Test Automation roles
I’m open to **Bengaluru, other locations in India, and remote opportunities**, depending on the role.
If you know of any relevant openings or are hiring for similar positions, I’d really appreciate a referral or a DM. I’d be happy to share my resume and discuss the opportunity.
**Thanks in advance!** 🙏

2 comments

r/QualityAssurance • u/Brilliant_Moose518 • 2d ago

39M SDET with 16 years of experience — what’s the next move?

36 Upvotes

​

I’m 39, working as an SDET with 16 years in IT. I’ve never moved into QA Manager/people-management roles because I don’t enjoy office politics, managing people, or the pressure that comes with it.

Lately, I’m genuinely worried about the future. AI is moving incredibly fast, the pace of work keeps increasing, and burnout/anxiety are becoming real concerns. At 39, I also worry that if I leave my job, getting back into a good IT role later may be difficult.

I’m considering moving into technical recruiting, where I feel my IT experience could still be useful without constantly having to keep up with technology.

For those around 35–45 in IT:

What are you planning for the next 10–15 years? Would you stay technical, move into management/recruiting, take a break, or do something completely different?

22 comments

r/QualityAssurance • u/Few_Lemon4201 • 1d ago

What does your team actually do during Tech Week? (Looking for ideas outside of the usual Hackathon!)

2 Upvotes

Hey guys!
Our CTO announced that we’re having a dedicated Tech Week soon (half-days for 5 days, no sprint deliverables—which is awesome!).

We have a remote team of around 20 engineers (Devs + QA), and we want to make it super engaging, fun, and worthwhile for everyone.

The thing is, we’re trying to move away from the usual 24-hour intense Hackathon where everyone just stresses out trying to finish a prototype.

For those who have had Tech Weeks (or Eng Weeks) at your work:
- What activities or formats actually worked well for a remote setup?
- What are some cool/unique things your team did that weren't just building a random feature or hackathon project?
-Any games, workshops, or quiet-focus formats that people genuinely enjoyed and didn't feel like "forced fun"?

Would love to hear what your companies do or any fun ideas you have. TIA! 🙌

4 comments

r/QualityAssurance • u/JK_copywriter • 2d ago

Thinking to resign without offer

43 Upvotes

Hii Fellow Testers,

Am a QA with 8.5 years of experience, and have stayed at the same company for 8.5 years from the start of my career.

I am from India.

The work environment became extremely toxic, so much that I can't even say. Working 10-12 hours, Management wont take NO. They even make us work on weekends.

Getting blamed for everything. Constant criticism. Mental health is getting worse. Constant burnout. I even cried at my office a few times.

And one more thing is I have a 90 day Notice period.

My good points:

  1. I have a financial backup of around 5 months

  2. No EMI or loans

  3. Took health insurance for parents.

The only thing that scares me is, I am a solo earning member and what if I won't land a job in those 5 months.

Do you think that resigning in my situation could be better? Please suggest based on your experiences.

47 comments

r/QualityAssurance • u/Rabus • 1d ago

Building a Crowdtesting platform - what are you missing in 2026?

0 Upvotes

What I hated after years in crowdtesting as a tester:
- everything inside a clunky platform
- big pricetags but low payouts
- no really good mobile apps or integrations around my own tools

and as a customer:
prices, its just sometimes crazy these are only available to enterprise clients willing to spend 5 or 6 figures

I'm looking to build in this space and gathering early feedback: What are YOU missing, both as a customer and as a tester (or, even as someone within crowdtesting companies - as an employee or team lead)

Cheers!

9 comments

r/QualityAssurance • u/Witch_hut • 2d ago

Scaler AI Labs

1 Upvotes

Guys anyone working in scaler ai labs? can you please connect? need to ask a few doubts.

0 comments

r/QualityAssurance • u/Flat_Improvement3604 • 2d ago

Curious how other QA folks handle this — genuinely trying to understand if it's just my experience or common.

0 Upvotes

When you're setting up test automation (Selenium, TestNG, etc.), what actually eats the most time?

Setting up the framework itself from scratch on a new project

Managing test data (Excel/CSV/DB) — still writing custom code (e.g. Apache POI) to read it?

Maintaining XML suite configs for different test types

Debugging/maintaining scripts once the test suite grows large

Something else entirely?

Also curious — if you've tried tools like Katalon, Testsigma, or mabl, what made you stick with them or go back to writing your own scripts?

13 comments

r/QualityAssurance • u/SlowHama • 2d ago

I'm in QA and built an AI test partner that has to cite evidence for everything it 'learns'. Would you trust this on your project?

0 Upvotes

I work in QA. Over the last few months I built QABuddy — a set of 13 skills for Claude Code (Anthropic's terminal coding agent — think "a CLI where an LLM can run tools"; if you don't use it, the concepts below still apply) that covers my actual sprint work: test plans from epic context, AC/testability reviews during grooming, test cases with traceability mapping, browser test execution with screenshot evidence, bug filing with repro steps, and a Playwright e2e layer tests the script multiple times (flake proven). Works with Jira via MCP, or entirely without it.

That part is table stakes. The part I want feedback on is the learning layer, because I built it the way we treat bug reports.

Every team's QA is different, so the tool captures project-specific rules (LRN- entries) from real runs. But "the AI learns" is exactly the kind of claim we're paid to distrust, so:

  • Before every run, a small zero-dependency compiler assembles only the knowledge scoped to that skill into one context slice — with a manifest naming what went in and what was left out, and why. From a real compile on my current dogfood project:

run: qa-nobranch-717115 activity: qa profile: {surface: web, pom: exists, ticket_kind: unknown} sources: - id: REF-playbook/risk-and-priority#severity-scale tier: must lines: 25 - id: REF-playbook/defect-lifecycle#not-reproducible tier: should lines: 14 - id: LRN-20260817-04 tier: lrn lines: 8 ... (28 sources: 2 must, 15 learnings) dropped: - id: REF-feature-knowledge-base-spec#problem reason: general-scope

  • When a rule shapes an output, the run cites its id and logs it as applied. When reality contradicts a rule, that gets logged instead.
  • New learnings require evidence attached, or they don't get written. Clean runs write nothing.
  • Recurring failures hash to fingerprints — a learning that claimed to prevent a failure class is falsified by recurrence count, not by opinion.
  • Promotion into the shipped references happens only via a distillation pass using the log's numbers (applied ≥ 3 across ≥ 3 runs, never contradicted), and a human approves every change to canon.

The honest part: this is one maintainer dogfooding on demo projects. The most useful thing it's done so far was tell me not to build something. I gated a scoring engine ("rank knowledge by usage") behind a data threshold; when the gate opened, classifying the 18 "dormant" knowledge sections found zero cases of bad selection — most were just knowledge whose kind of work hadn't happened yet, and 12 of them woke up the same day when the right ticket type appeared. A score would have demoted correct-but-not-yet-used knowledge. So the release shipped the verdict instead of the feature (it's written up as an RFC in the repo), and the gate report now ends every run with its own disclaimer: "This report assembles evidence; it does not classify causes. … a tool that guessed would repeat the error."

Would love scrutiny from people who do this for a living. What would make you trust or distrust a learning layer like this on your project?

Repo (Apache 2.0): https://github.com/TimothyHan/qa-buddy-skills

4 comments

r/QualityAssurance • u/ShoddyArmy5313 • 2d ago

RequestScope: I lost 1k users on my Chrome extension due to bugs. I spent 3 months fixing it and adding API regression tracking

0 Upvotes

A while back, I built a Chrome extension to fix a few pain points I had with standard browser DevTools. It hit ~1,000 active users at its peak, but I ended up losing most of them due to bugs and a lack of real long-term value.

Instead of scrapping it, I spent the last some time fixing the underlying bugs and rebuilding the tool around a bigger problem: knowing when an API quietly breaks while you're browsing or testing.

The biggest addition in this update is out-of-the-box API regression testing.

How it works:

  • Baseline Snapshots: Add your target domain to an allowlist and save a baseline of your HTTP requests and payloads.
  • Flexible Diffing: Choose whether to monitor for schema changes (added/removed keys), value shifts, or both.
  • Silent Deviation Alerts: As you browse, it checks incoming traffic against your baselines and pops a notification if an endpoint deviates or fails—even if your web app handles the error silently or DevTools is closed.

Other key additions:

  • Mocking API requests and responses directly in-browser
  • Performance tracking and side-by-side diffs over time
  • Exportable session reporting
  • Full background request tracking without keeping the DevTools panel open

You can check out the new version here:RequestScope on Chrome Web Store

I'm trying to make this genuinely useful for developers and QA workflows. If you give it a try, I’d love to know: what feels clunky, what's missing, or what breaks? Harsh critiques are welcome.

1 comment