r/softwaretesting

I'm seeing so many posts how people are getting burnout, or getting frustrated/scared of AI takeover, or just not being able to get a job.

Maybe my company acts a bit different from the norm but I still find there's a good balance of ongoing and growing mix of manual and automation with AI mostly just used as assistance for test case creation, and maybe some automation coding.

We still do things like a mix of proper test prep, test rail creation, general good use of sprint and monthly release timing, and a good mix of dev/test coordination and while DEV still makes their own unit tests ultimately QA/Test Team still plays a big part of controlled testing.

Obviously no job is perfect, but in the 7+ years I've been working I like how relatively stable things to be here since proper "test thought" is always a priority for QA team and just using the right mix of manual and automation testing (hell half our team is still mostly/only manual testing)

It does help our system is pretty data sensitive so it would be risky to go the full-on AI approach but so far there's no worry of AI takeover or job security from what I see (provided continue to do good job of course).

Hello everyone! So I have this project since a long time ago, and it was working just fine with setting the capabilities in Katalon settings. I just had "prefs" and "download.default_directory".

Suddenly (andthis happened as well in Edge Chromium) the "Save as" pop up started to appear, so I added "download.prompt_for_download" but it was ignored when under "prefs", but it works when under "goog:chromeOptions -> prefs".

The thing is, that when I nest both under "goog:chromeOptions -> prefs" the pop up doesnt show (which is ok) but katalon/chrome saves the file in the default chrome folder (which is not ok).

If I put "prefs" with "download.default_directory" and also "goog:chromeOptions -> prefs" with "download.prompt_for_download", the "save as" pop up opens up, but the directory in which is going to save the file is okay.

So I don't know what is going on and why it suddenly the driver stopped working as it was.

I spent hours trying to figure it out and was not able to fix it.

Any help is welcomed.

i've seen teams add more required fields when reports are vague, then wonder why non technical reporters still leave gaps. i'd baseline three things for two weeks: time until an engineer first reproduces the issue, number of clarification loops, and percentage of tickets returned for missing context. then simplify intake around the smallest executable path: starting page, last known good state, decisive action, expected versus actual, browser context, and the first visible contradiction. a bug report is useful when the receiver can reproduce or confidently isolate the missing state without another meeting. which metric changed your team's reporting process?

I’m currently looking for a new remote role, and I’ve noticed that many QA positions ask for ISTQB certifications beyond Foundation, which is the one I currently have.

The main challenge for me is finding enough focused study time while working eight hours a day. Reading a syllabus after spending the whole day in front of a screen can be difficult, so I’ve been experimenting with a different study method.

When I was a student, I used to record myself explaining difficult topics and listen to the recordings while walking, driving, exercising or doing household tasks. Repetition helped me retain the material, even though it never replaced properly reading and understanding it.

I’ve recently adapted that approach to certification study. I use the official syllabus and its learning objectives to structure AI-assisted, podcast-style summaries, with automatically generated audio and simple slides. ( I upload them to YouTube mainly for convenience, so I can continue listening from whichever device I have available whenever I find some free time)

I’m curious about how other people manage certification study while working full-time.

Do you reserve fixed study sessions, use flashcards, listen to audio, work through sample exams, or rely mostly on hands-on practice? What has actually worked for you long term?

Hi guys,

Just wondering, do you have suggestions of good courses/you tube videos/ certifications, regarding AI for QA?

Thank you 😊

My company finds out that they are too late to the AI show, so now we are fast tracking Claude for developers and test. (with only me as a technical tester..)

I will have a session with the developers regarding how to have the best workflow for test purposes, and I was wondering if anyone has any recent experience with Claude and test.

I do a lot of projects on my own, and I feel the recent models are very good at identifying edge cases and do end to end testing in its virtual browser.

Anything we should add to ClaudeMD, skills to create and so on..? I am happy with my workplace, because they value test a lot and will listen to my suggestions

Sorry for bad english, I am based in Europe and did not want to make some AI slop post

Looking forward to your experiences

Edit; Guys thanks for advice on not hiring an agency and hiring on team one person rn seems like the best option. As much as I wanna answer you, the post has been locked.

I am running a SaaS lead gen software in Sweden. I see some good reviews on Capterra and G2 for many companies charging less than $25 an hour, but all of them are from either India-based, Pakistan, or Indonesia.

We only have 4 devs, and testing seems like a problem we can't ignore now. My devs and non-tech people here are doing QA for us; but apparently we still have bugs. Now I think it's time we hire a specialist. But In-house would be too difficult and might get out of budget.

We were thinking between freelancer vs agency. What should I opt for? Have you guys had any experience regarding this so far?

Also, even if I hire freelancer, I will have to review or manage him, which I don't want. So an agency seems like the way for me.

But at the time my concern with an agency is that there are alot of scammers from these countries so I would need your opinion from people who have experience.

PS, little request: please don't promote i need real advice under this subreddit.

For instance if you need to run a test procedure like a regression test that goes from dashboard, clicks hamburger, then goes to search page searches for a project of record, then clicks time slice and then does only certain test from the test procedure.

So I wanna only call one or two from each test page. So one from hamburger, two test from search, and two from timr slice page. How can I do this in a flow type of way?

What’s the best way to go about this.

I find the jokes super funny that are like “when the QA says ‘the test fails when user clicks the button 6 times and jumps up and down and clicks it again’ .. (basically unlikely situations)“ Hilarious don’t get me wrong and they are just jokes, but the reality is so different 😭😭😭
Most of us have no time to go looking for stuff like that and sometimes it’s a struggle to complete the amount of regression I’m assigned. For me, all the bugs that have been open for several months in QA environment are basic functions like clicking a button and a status changing. Nothing outlandish. So the different perspectives are interesting. Why do you think devs act like we’re picky?

So internally, I think we’ve hit the ceiling of spreadsheet-based LLM QA. Maybe it’s just the growing pains as we approach our Series A, but what worked for us as a seed startup is currently killing our scaling capability. 

We have a support summarizer that does a decent job most days. Every prompt tweak seems to fix one class of tickets, but then damage another. Last week we improved summaries for long technical tickets, which was nice, but then billing cases started losing refund context and escalation cases got weirdly overconfident.

Our current process is simply exporting a pile of examples, rerun the prompt, and have humans reread the before and after. It works until it doesn’t. Nobody wants to manually inspect 200 outputs every time we change a system prompt, swap models, adjust temperature, or touch retrieval. 

I am trying to move this toward an actual eval pipeline. Something like production traces becoming datasets, custom scorers for must-include fields, LLM based judges for summary quality, and a CI gate that blocks a change if known billing, refund, or escalation cases regress. I’m looking at tools like Langfuse or Braintrust for the run/eval history part, mostly because I don’t want to glue together five half tools if I can avoid it.

Not seeking for perfect, just good enough, I would settle for catching obvious regressions before they become tickets, bonus points if PMs can review failures without needing a local dev setup.

What are you using here and what parts of your eval setup really paid for themselves?

So, some background: myself and a programmer are making a project. And while he's doing the main work - programming, my role is testing and sales.

I have never tested software before, and i lack the skills to do so. I have asked my friend (the guy programming it together) and he replies back saying "All you need to do is break it, and tell me how you broke it."

But i don't know how to break it... (he has said if i don''t know what i'm doing then it's fine)

He's shown me some ways, like, on the web portal, he's said:"it asks for numbers, but letters in it" or on the app, he'll say "Just poke it, and put odd things in the textfields" and "just poke it till it breaks"

But i don't know what that means!

He has been doing some testing himself, and hes found a few things that i couldn't and assigned himself to the bug on Jira? (whatever that means) but i want to help, and i don't think he knows how to be helpful - or teach me how to do what he's asking? if that makes sense

My question is: how can i test. He has asked me to test a web portal (which is a website which manages the app) and the app (which is what the customers use)

How do i best approach this? I'm sorry of this is the wrong sub, but it is /softwaretesting :-)

Thank you.

The app worked perfectly, until the phone went offline

We had this offline editing feature that everyone thought was already tested properly..... you could edit something without a connection, the app would keep the change locally, and once the connection came back it would sync everything with the server

The E2E test was pretty simple, take the phone offline, make an edit, bring the connection back, check the server, everything passed every time. So naturally we thought we were done with it

Then we found a case we hadn't tested at all

The test always started with the phone already offline, but real users obviously don't know when their connection is going to disappear..... someone can start editing while they're connected, lose the connection halfway through, and just keep going because the app is still responding normally

That's what eventually exposed the bug

Someone starts editing, the app sends a request, the connection disappears, the request fails or gets stuck, and the user keeps making changes. Now the phone has the newer version while the server still has the older one

When the connection comes back, the app has to figure out which version should win, and in our case it didn't always get that right

The UI was still showing the user's latest changes so everything looked completely normal from their side..... no error, no warning, nothing that would make them think their change wasn't safe

They could finish editing, close the app and move on thinking everything had been saved

Then they would open it later and the old value would be back

That was the really annoying part because the user wouldn't even know when it happened. They could make a change at 6pm, close the app, come back later and just wonder why their edit had disappeared

We could reproduce it sometimes, but only when we started messing around with the timing of the network connection and the requests. It wasn't really an offline bug in the way we originally thought about offline bugs

It was a timing problem between the local change, the request that was already running, the connection disappearing and then coming back again.....

And that made me look at our offline tests a little differently

It's not enough to test what happens when the app is already offline. You also need to test what happens when the connection disappears while something is already happening

Because users don't wait for requests to finish before doing the next thing. They lose Wi-Fi in a train, switch networks, lock their phone halfway through an edit, come back after ten minutes or tap the same button again because they're not sure if the first tap worked

Our tests are usually very clean and predictable

Real users are not.....

And I think that's where a lot of these bugs come from, those tiny moments where the app is changing from one state to another and the user just keeps doing what they were doing

Nothing crashes, nothing turns red, the test suite stays green

The app just quietly forgets something the user thought they had saved

I am transitioning into a role focused on software quality, which involves me taking ownership of software testing. I've worked as a software engineer for several years, so I am very comfortable with the development side of the of the software lifecycle.

• What are the best resources to learn the fundamental principles of software testing?
• What tools should I prioritize learning?
• How important is it to transition a product from primarily manual testing to automated testing?

What does your team do with them? Do you include the investigation in the sprint? What's your test plan?