r/softwaretesting

Hi all!
Our team is looking for some QA tools/platform to commit to. We need something that preferably covers/provides:
- test case management
- integration for bug tracking (azure)
- automated tests - preferably low code automation available
- some decent quality AI support for eg test case generation

I’m aware of eg Browserstack that seem to meet what we could be interested in, but what are some alternatives and their advantages?

Hey everyone,

I’m currently exploring QA Automation Testing as a career path in India and wanted some realistic insights from people already working in this field.

I come from a development background and I’m considering shifting toward Automation QA/SDET because the generic web development market feels extremely overcrowded right now for freshers.

I wanted to know:

* How is the current job market for QA Automation Engineers in India?

* Are companies actively hiring freshers/juniors for automation roles?

* Which tools are most in demand right now — Selenium, Playwright, Cypress, Appium, etc.?

* Is manual testing still required before moving into automation?

* How difficult is it to switch from QA Automation to DevOps or SDET roles later?

* What salary range is realistic for freshers and after 2–3 years?

* Which skills actually help candidates stand out in interviews?

* Is this field still a good long-term career in the AI era?

Would really appreciate honest advice from people currently working in testing/automation/SDET roles.

Thanks!

Hello All , i have been working as a manual tester till 2023 i have 7 yrs of experience but i have career gap of more than 2 yrs i am completely in isolation and lost motivation for study..can i get some help on this how to stay motivated ?

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.

I'm an SDET working with AI. I built an MCP (with basic CRUD operations) and a separate Skill (for query + custom logic) on top of Elasticsearch. Both are connected to Claude Code + Minimax 2.7.

The problem: When I ask for a query, Claude Code sometimes uses my Skill, but other times it ignores the Skill and calls the MCP query directly. I added field mappings and simplifications inside the Skill, so if the MCP is called directly, those mappings are skipped and the query fails.

Has anyone else experienced this kind of inconsistent behavior? How do you prevent the model from bypassing the Skill? Do I really have to explicitly call the Skill every time, like /es_query_skill?

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

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.

My org expects QA to fully integrate AI tooling. In fact, the only manual they’d like is exploratory. Fine by me, that’s where I find the most bugs.

There’s no pipeline for QA to even move into automation. They want devs and junior devs doing that. There used to be a path to move into automation, but they removed that and restructured. There’s not a lot of lateral movement to be had here.

But now, I am expected to automate tests and fix bugs with no title change or wage increase. I can do both skills-wise, but it’s starting to piss me off. I’d like to AT LEAST be paid as a junior dev. I get that I rely on the AI tooling more than the others, but considering that I test my fixes really well before submitting, they are rarely rejected.

Plus I am still the primary QA and the only one automating. The rest are struggling with the tooling. I was able to get started in just a couple of hours. I am still paid far less than my peers. I’ve had three sit down sessions with management and they say that a title change and compensation discussion is in progress, but it’s been about seven months.

I’m currently looking for new roles.

Are any of your orgs trying to use QA as a cheaper dev? Have any of you had success with securing better compensation if you are adding more value?

Junior SDET here, 2 years in. I started under one of the seniors on my team who taught me how to write decent Selenium and Playwright tests. Last month she got pulled into a 1:1 and told her role is "merging into engineering" and she's now an engineer who focuses on quality. The same talk went to the other 3 seniors on the team yet I don't see anybody saying any of this in standup. I want to know if this is happening everywhere or just here.

Currently a Sr platform engineer

Things I like about current job:

• Creating tests
• Leading testing initiatives
• Creating CICD pipelines
• Automation
• Reducing developer toil
• Finding and debugging issues
• Building internal tools
• Systems engineering
• Architecting and validating system reliability
• Threat modeling and automating security posture
• Autonomy to work on improvements I think of
• Defining SLI, SLO, and SLAs

Things I dislike:

• On call
• Being responsible for infrastructure uptime SLAs
• Tracking and monitoring SLI, SLO, and SLAs

I had about 10 interviews the past few years for platform roles, and every one said that they had some form of on-call.

After looking through many posts here, it seems like SDET has the potential to cover most of the things I like, with none of the dislikes.

I don't mind a decrease in salary.

The only thing I'm worried about is having to start as a junior/mid-level SDET and losing some autonomy for a few years while I work my way back up to senior.

Any other considerations I should take into account?

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🚀 We’re Hiring | QA Automation Engineers | PAN India | Remote Opportunity 🚀

We are looking for passionate and skilled QA Automation Engineers to join our growing team for a PAN India remote opportunity.

💼 Role: QA Automation Engineer
📍 Location: Remote (PAN India)
🧑‍💻 Experience Required: 6+ Years
💰 Salary Range: 15–16 LPA

🔹 Required Skills:
• QA Automation & Software Testing
• Selenium (Java/Python) or Pytest
• API Testing using Postman / Rest Assured
• SQL & Financial Data Validation
• Automation Framework Development

🎁 Key Benefits:
• Competitive Salary
• Health Coverage
• Paid Time Off & Wellness Support

If you’re interested, feel free to DM me and I’ll share my email address where you can send your resume.

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

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?

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

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?

Our QA team needs fresh, anonymized data for every test cycle. Right now a dev pulls from prod, runs a script to mask PII, and loads to staging. It takes 2 days and sometimes leaks real emails.

We need to schedule this weekly, mask by data type, keep relational integrity, and verify row counts. Most tools are enterprise grade with 6 month implementations. We are a 30 person team. How are smaller QA teams handling test data extraction automation without risking compliance?

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

They edited my bug report and now I look like I'm making things up

I'm dev who got pulled into QA because ours quit. I have reached enlightenment

I filed a bug last week, six steps to reproduce, screen recording, exact input that triggered it, expected vs actual, a report where there's genuinely nothing left to interpret.

It came back marked fixed, retested. still broken. rejected it.

The dev pushed back. says I'm testing it wrong, so I go back to the ticket to pull up my original steps and I'm reading them and something feels off, they're shorter than I remember. the specific condition that triggered the bug is just replaced with a vague one liner that technically describes the feature but tells you about what breaks it.

someone had edited my repro steps and because I'd been retesting from the edited ticket without realizing it, I couldn't point to what I originally wrote anymore, so when I kept rejecting it I just looked like I was being difficult, no receipts, just me saying "no this is still broken" with nothing to back it up.

This isn't accidental, you don't accidentally turn a six step reproduction case into one sentence, you don't accidentally remove the exact input sequence that makes something reproducible. Whoever did this read my report carefully enough to know exactly what to take out.

that's deliberate and if that person is reading it I hope your coffee tastes like crap.

I've been in this role 2 weeks and I already understand why QA people burn out, it's not the bugs, it's that your job is to find problems and then spend equal time proving those problems are real to people who need them not to be.

Guys what should I do now, we are still trying to onboard a QA

Update: found the edit history.