r/QualityAssurance

Hello all, I wanted to ask everyone since so far I have been seeing mostly use of Java/Python or most recently JS/TS as languages used for test automation, but pretty much all offers except one I got in last two months or so on linkedin were asking for C# knowledge (and when I asked about that the HR people always said that they look with already existing skills in that).

Is that common these days, or did I just got into some weird atypical job offer bubble?

I have been working with Java all my automation carreer (so roughly last 5 out of almost 10 yoe) and was about to start learning Playwright with TS but now I am not sure if I should not rather start learning C# + PW instead...

Any advice on this is welcome.

P.S. I am about to change jobs in a few months due to lay offs in my current company so this is super relevant for me on which direction should I take.

1. I started as QA for small websites as my first job. WordPress , Blogging websites, using Waterfall. Stayed there for 5 years coz got rejected with other applications

2. Joined a startup company testing again WordPress sites. AWOL after a month coz of bad manager attitude.

3. Been practicing selenium java automation from 2016-2019 but bombarded by manual qa tasks so self study always being stopped

4. Luckily hired by a good company. As a manual qa, this time I worked on scrum team and with good qa process

5. Deployed to a client as manual qa, but they already have stable automation selenium team so I stayed as manual

6. Transferred to another client. Again, as manual qa and it felt going back to zero. Bad micromanager, not following agile and no automation opportunities.

7. Got an opportunity to contribute to playwright automation this time for internal project in a company. Give me confidence coding, learning github and writing automation tests. But all UI no api yet.

8. Transferred again to another client. Opened up that I'm willing to be part playwright automation. But nothing, I still stayed as manual qa.

9. Now, been a year no Playwright coding. I'm tired. With all this AI stuff. Back to zero again. Lot to learn again.

10. I'm jealous of some QAs who started as manual and landed as fulltime automation job. And now they're good at it.

Been a frustrating QA career. I showed interest but just doesn't found the right fit.

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?

new client. e-commerce checkout flow. we'd tested it thoroughly. every payment path, every edge case we could think of. staging was clean. QA signed off. we shipped.

within six hours of go-live, orders were occasionally completing on the frontend but never hitting the order management system. customers getting confirmation emails. warehouse getting nothing. nobody knew until a customer called asking where their order was.

pulled everything apart. the issue was environment-specific database connection pooling behavior. under real concurrent load, connections were timing out silently and the fallback wasn't logging the failure, just swallowing it and returning success upstream.

staging never had more than three people on it at once. production had real traffic. that was the entire difference.

four months of clean tests meant nothing because we'd never tested the thing the environment actually does differently from staging: volume.

lesson we don't forget now. load test in an environment that mirrors production connection limits before anything ships.

Our client cut the budget for current fiscal year by 35-45% and no surprises, all except 2 QAs were let go . Some BAs and Devs were also planned to be let go but ratio of QAs were higher.

The general reason for the ramp down was introduction of agentic AI few months ago and faster to release but this was not called out a reason.

Interestingly in a call last week, one of the client stakeholder was concerned of going into an initiative without QA. The person was confused on who will understand the product and be responsible for the quality gateway. They stressed out on risks of going into this program without an established role which they deemed not so important.

Silently I was smiling knowing I will be let go in few weeks.

I am building a playwright dashboard to solve some problems. i dont know whether these problems are real pain points or not. playwright html reporter is bit ugly and does not keep track of previous reports. test artifacts disappear from CI after some days (to my knowledge). also keeping track of flaky tests seems difficult. what if i build a dashboard that keeps historical data of tests, flakiness intelligence and tests health etc and user move their CI tests using websockets to my cloud servers that would increase test execution speed (more workers) and they may not have to pay for github actions (when free tier limit reach) or separate VPS for jenkins. so user wont have to setup their servers for testing, just one line of code change and my cloud would handle tests. so in short, playwright dashboard with historical data, videos and flaky tests intelligence + cloud runner. does this idea solves pain point of test automation engineers?? would they willing to pay for this? or i give up on this

Hi all,

I'm a lone QA engineer at a fintech company who essentially makes glorified web dashboards for clients, I've been building a test framework for the past year however there are some major problems which I am unable to come up with solutions for.

Our product is essentially multiple dashboards, one for each client, our repositories are split up like the following

Dashboard 1 Frontend => Backend1
                       Backend2
                       Backend3

Dashboard 2 Frontend => Backend1
                        Backend2

Its essentially this for like 6 different apps, each app has similiar functionality which we configure on a per app basis. For my test framework, I essentially built an npm package using TS and Playwright following a data-driven approach, meaning I wrote generic feature tests as functions and created 'test data' classes/objects which the test framework uses to generate tests based on the data provided. This works well but im really struggling with CI/CD integration.

Currently, the package is used in each frontend repository, but the issue is that this means the tests only really run on frontend changes, which isn't ideal. The other problem is that some of the backends take over an hour to deploy, so it isn't really feasible to deploy on every PR/merge.

I'm also running on limited resources, I have a single VM which I've turned into a bitbucket runner, and im using ReportPortal to collect all results in a single place.

Any advice on how to handle test framework CI/CD integration for an architecture like this?

Hey everyone,

I just passed Round 1 for a QA Automation Engineer / SDET role at PayPay (interviewing with the global/Japan team).

Round 2 is scheduled for next week, If anyone has interviewed here or works at PayPay as an SDET, what should I expect?

Is it pure LeetCode, or more focused on Low-Level Design and framework architecture? Any specific topics or recent questions you can share?

Thanks

My company is developing tms platform.

After a brief survey across all projects in the company, it turns out a lot of folks are using Google Sheets to manage theirs runs, test cases whats not.

As to why company is doing it, i can only assume money. They did a short demo its quite nice, looks similar to TestRail (but with Jira-vibe, if you know what i mean) with AI (obviously).

But i started to wonder that it was made for QAs use only. And usually someone else is making calls as to what product/solutions/tools to buy.

If you were to ask from management on your project - do you want this or that solution to manage test cases, test runs - would you try and persuade PM or CFO to pay extra for a tool? Or just use free solution? Or use something else like Google Sheets as tms?

Obviously it depends on your project, team and management and maybe something else, but...

Note: cannot share this platform, nor I want to promote anything, just curious what you think

Currently working as a manual tester and learning API automation. Looking to switch into automation, can I add automation in my resume without having working experience?

And what if I get stuck in scenario based questions?🥲

Hi Reddit Community,

I am currently exploring new opportunities as a QA Engineer / QA Automation Engineer and I am available as an Immediate Joiner. I got laid off from my job in march. Initially i was getting the recruiters call but now i am not getting any calls. So please suggest what should i do.

I bring 3 years of experience in Quality Assurance, with hands-on expertise in Web Automation, API Automation, Manual Testing, Regression Testing, CI/CD-based test execution, and Agile QA practices.

My core skills include Selenium, Playwright, REST Assured, Postman, Java, Python, TypeScript, TestNG, Cucumber BDD, Jenkins, Git, Docker, Jira, MySQL, and JMeter.

I have worked on automating UI and API test cases, improving regression coverage, supporting production releases, managing defect lifecycles, and contributing to quality improvements across web and API layers.

I am looking for opportunities where I can contribute as a QA professional and help teams deliver reliable and high-quality software.

If you know of any relevant openings or can refer me, please dm me.

Thank you.

Hey folks, I got an interview last week for the SDET role based in NJ.. I was extremely excited and nervous because 3 leaders and a director was next to me watching and I struggled. Even though I had an idea of what collections and how I can itirate but to be honest, I totally panicked and did not perform well.. technical interview was the last step of the hiring process

Its been 3-4 business days and I sent a follow up to HR asking any feedback that can help me and also when to hear back for the final decision. They havent replied yet but I was wondering if you had similar experience with Verisk. Any feedback from you guys will help me a lot keeping my mind clear.

This was a dream job so I am so excited to hear back. Even if it is a rejection, I would prefer a reply rather than ghosting. HR really seems to be nice so hoping to get a decision from them soon(I hope)!

Hey everyone. I'm a frontend developer, and to be completely honest, I don't have a deep QA background. But I see a recurring pattern in our workflows: I update a component or a layout, the UI changes slightly, and suddenly a bunch of tests break because of changed locators.

I'm trying to understand the actual cost and frustration of this maintenance loop. A few questions for the QA veterans here:

1. When a UI change breaks your tests, how much time does it actually take to track down the new selectors and fix them?
2. Who usually fixes them in your team? Do QA engineers have to chase down the devs, or is the dev expected to fix the tests before merging?
3. How often does this happen? Is it a daily struggle or just an end-of-sprint annoyance?
4. Have you tried any of those "self-healing" tools? Do they actually work in the real world, or do they just create more noise?

Full transparency: I'm hacking together a side project to auto-fix locators and want to make sure I'm solving a real problem before I spend my weekends writing more code. I'd really appreciate your raw opinions!

I've been to several projects where they hire dedicated people to only automate tests. I'd like to know if I'm the only one who thinks this, or maybe we're not doing it right with them but I don't see the value.

These team members doesn't bother to understand the product. They just wait for manual testers to hand them off the test case, and they just follow it as it is.

My problem with this is:

1. They might not understand the intent of the test properly, what risks it protects us from, why we need the test

2. I don't believe that 1 manual test = 1 automated test. A manual functional test is written with a different goal and with assumptions that a human would intuitively understand. And some manual tests are too granular since we focus on asserting one thing or one goal. Whereas, for automation the granular part could fall under a unit/component test instead and the UI automation part would be more journey-based (rather than functional test cases, e2e test cases would apply more).

#1 make it difficult to trust them even when they say the test is done.

#2.1 just piles more work to the manual testers because my manager expects them to write separate e2e tests for the automation engineers to follow. but these manual testers won't know the best way it can be done as an automated tests.

#2.2 we lose the opportunity to discuss with developers how they the granular checks like making sure an error message shows when the field is blank should be covered by a unit test already, because the automation engineers just do it when they see a manual test for it and the manual testers didn't know about the concept of unit test

So for me, the right direction for a team is have someone who can do both manual and automation so they understand how to balance this with the understanding of the product.

Wdyt? Or are there just some gaps on our ways of working? How do you make it work with your team?

Hi fellow QAs!

I haven't been in a job interview for a while. Last one was before the "AI revolution".

I'm curious what kind of AI related questions do companies typically ask?

Would appreciate it if you could share your experiences.

Total 11+ yoe. Started with manual testing, api testing, did Selenium with Java, Cypress and using Playwright and it's MCP now. Current role is Senior QA. Now, at this time writing code isn't an important skill to have, gen ai can do it in a far better way. Should I plan to change my career to something else? Or should I acquire knowledge in some other framework?

So I'm automation tester with about 5 years of experience, a couple of months ago I've started applying to other companies for position of automation tester, due to changing politics in my current company and overall unsatisfaction with my position. In that time I've had 5-6 technical interviews. And holy shit am I bad at it.

I was kind of expecting that I'd need to upskill, but I didn't recognize of how much I don't know. I usually do fine with the testing related questions, but things related to programming languages, principles, CI/CD, or even frameworks which I used, which is mostly Playwright and Selenium, these questions I fail on a lot of the times. Not mentioning the leetcode type exercises which are stressing as hell, I get some of them right, but still need a lot of practice.

Anyone got that same "clash with reality" after you started interviewing for new companies? Not gonna lie sometimes after these interviews I just feel like I don't know shit about automation lol

I've been visiting the whole quality assurance vs quality control discussion, especially in context of modern PLM tools and I'm curious how teams are applying this in practice.

On paper, the distinction is straightforward. Quality assurance is about improving processes to prevent defects, while quality control focuses on identifying issues through testing and inspection. But in real workflows, the line gets fuzzy.

A lot of problems I've seen don't come from failed tests but from gaps earlier in the lifecycle. Things like inconsistent change tracking, disconnected data or decisions happening outside formal systems seem to be problems. By the time QC catches something, the cost of fixing it is already high. It seems especially true in the transition from design to production. Without a shared system, its easy for BOMs to drift, revisions to get out of sync, and teams to work off different versions of the same data.

This is where process structure and system alignment make a real difference. The idea of having single source of truth, structured change workflows, and tighter integration across engineering and manufacturing reels feels more aligned with QA ( process control) than just QC (inspection). so I'm curious how others approach this. Do you clearly separate QA and QC in your organization, or treat them as part of the same system? and where do most of your quality issue actually originate, in process gaps and product level defects?

I have 9+ years of experience as a QA engineer, 7 months back I switched to an MLOps Engineer role in the same organisation and our management encouraged all the other team members to also join Dev Teams. Now due to this AI, my company has decided to reduce the number of QAs across all the teams and they recently fired a couple of high management folks in the name of restructuring.

Due to this AI, now they want us to ship products as soon as possible as they have bought an enterprise software and want us to utilize that but that thing also has a limitation and it creates buggy code for which the management doesn't want to give us time to test and they have also started to micro manage because let's face it my manager is also somewhat scared to get fired but this is burning me out, I work for like 10-11 hours per day every week.

I am thinking if I should start looking for another job but for what profile I am not that proficient as a n MLOps Engineer and I am scared about QA Engineers' future.

We're a Tier-1 automotive supplier and have our first formal CSMS audit under ISO 21434 coming up in Q3. I've been put in charge of making sure our testing process is audit-ready and the more I dig into what auditors actually want to see the more I realize our current setup is going to be a problem.

Right now our team of engineers run tests and the results go into one system, then requirements traceability is maintained manually in another, so when an auditor asks to see the evidence chain from requirement to test to result we have to stitch it together manually every time. It works but it's REALLY slow and error-prone.

What ISO 21434 wants is a clear unbroken chain showing that every cybersecurity requirement was tested, that the test results are documented, and that the evidence is reproducible and verifiable without manual assembly before every audit cycle.

Has anyone here dealt with a similar traceability gap, automotive or otherwise, and found something that actually solved it?