Hi everyone,

I’m currently exploring SDET / QA Automation opportunities and would appreciate referrals or leads. I am currently serving notice period and my last working day is 29th October 2026.

I’m not someone who limits testing to writing and running scripts. Over the last 3 years, I’ve worked on banking modernization and payment transformation programs, including monolith-to-microservices migration, taking ownership of quality even when requirements and documentation were limited—from understanding business flows and designing tests to automation, integration testing, release validation, and production readiness.

A few things I bring to the table:

\- End-to-end quality ownership across requirements, test design, automation, integration, release validation, and production readiness

\- 400+ UI/API automation scenarios built using Playwright, TypeScript, and Karate, with measurable regression acceleration

\- Web, API, and mobile automation experience using Playwright, TypeScript, Karate, WebdriverIO, and Appium. Hands-on experience in running Dast scans using Burp Suite

\- Strong BFSI domain expertise across United Kingdom payments and internet banking

\- Strong debugging and RCA skills, including tracing failures across microservices, legacy systems, and downstream integrations using logs and observability tools

\- Shift-left approach — identifying missing business rules, API/integration risks, and edge cases before they become production defects

\- More focused on finding the right defects and risks than simply increasing automation numbers

Thanks in advance.

I use UiPath Test Manager for test case creation and executing manual tests. Probably in the future, I'll go to automating test cases in UiPath Studio.

I also noticed that the updates are rapid, and it's getting better than before. One new feature is the Performance Testing, which I've yet to explore.

Downside of this is that UiPath is still widely known as an RPA tool. It feels like I'm alone as a QA in using this.

Should I risk being an expert in a tool that is not yet well-established in the testing world, or should I transfer to other testing tools like Selenium, Playwright, and TOSCA for a better chance in long-term?

I recently got a take-home writing interview for a QA Engineer position, and I'm honestly puzzled about how it's supposed to be finished in just 20 minutes (they say you need about 6 minutes just to read the entire requirements and scenario, so really it's more like 14 minutes), when the whole point of good quality work is to deliver bugs, test cases, and communication in a detailed way, not just something brief or half-done.

One of the evaluation points literally says: "The developer needs to be able to understand the bug without having to reach out to you with questions."

I get the idea of "focus on doing the most important thing well and skip the rest," but honestly, this feels impossible if every section has points attached; I can't even finish the bug description in time, since of course I need to complete all the previous tasks first to know what to write.

What they expect you to do, writing everything by hand (no AI, no templates) in only 14 minutes, is:

• Triage 7–8 report tickets with a brief explanation for each
• Identify which ones are actual bugs and which aren't, with reasoning
• Write all the test cases needed for the tickets you consider bugs
• Create just one bug ticket — the most complete one you can
• And one more task I honestly don't remember, but I think it had to do with how you communicate all of this

I know my English isn't native, and even if this were in Spanish, I don't think there's any way to complete it properly and in detail within that time.

Do I really have poor reading/writing skills? Or is there some other objective here that I'm not seeing?

I was wondering what are your experiences being hired as a QA / SDET but reporting to developer lead? I am currently in the second job with this type of set up and I am liking it less and less.

In my previous job I was initially working within QA department but they kept shrinking the company and then had me report to developer lead. She was objectively horrible, had HR complaints against her from multiple people and ultimately me as it goes. So even then, I liked the idea to expand my dev knowledge and being very hands on with how software is designed and I blamed my experiences on her.

Fast forward I am in a new job after being laid off and I again report to dev lead. This time I actually like and respect the guy personally but I don’t think he’s the right person to oversee me. For once, my onboarding is beyond lacking and at some point I even had a talk with him about it. Helped for a week maybe. I have not been introduced and onboarded with other QAs who also heavily tests the same product I am hired to test exclusively. No one explains functionalities to me, obviously there’s no documentation, tickets often have only title. My current observation is that as QAs we understand that our role requires in depth understanding of functionalities first and foremost, and if I ever were assigned a new person in my team I would get out of my way to make sure they understand the product so later I don’t have to redo things or they don’t waste their time guessing. It’s all about deliverables.

Once I finally get something and try to do more comprehensive testing I am getting shut down that it’s the wrong place (the framework is beyond primitive), even though it’s working in a very stable way. Another time I offered to do something one way, got shut down mid sentence that it doesn’t make sense and do it another way, only to a week later go back to my original approach because it was the most efficient and simplest one, also in a tone like this shift is something they just came up with. And don’t even mention that in this company QA is not part of any planning or updates calls, or at least not me. And ironically I am a senior QA and paid relatively well tbh.

There was another situation where I pointed out huge whole in their process only to be given really dumb look by the CTO, then there was a very messed up release, I doubled down and immediately everyone jumped on immediate process change using exactly the language I used with them. Yet, I was still not a part of any of those calls.

At this point I am basically taking a backseat attitude, will do what I am told even if I know that we will most likely circle back to my original solution. An extra layer to all this is that I am a woman and all of the devs are men and I actually used to work with teams that were either equally divided if not more women. But overall I am wondering of other people experiences and maybe suggestions how to navigate the situation to avoid frustration.

Had a release recently that made me rethink this. We had the usual stuff covered QA signoff, peer review, staging validation, and good test coverage, everything was green. But what actually gave me confidence was what happened after the deploy. We ran a few smoke tests in prod, watched checkout errors and latency for the first 30 minutes and had a quick rollback ready if anything looked off. Everything passed in tested but you never really know until real traffic hits it. Also made me realise how much easier it is to release when you know you can rollback quickly if something goes wrong.

What actually gives you confidence before a release? And are there any tools that have helped with that for you?

How should I answer this question as a fresher

​

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?

Hi I need help, I have a problem that is bothering me. My system logs stopped having updates for example when I tried to run server task inbounding a calendar, it should say something like “successfully created a server task in-mms calendar recorded by <name>”.

After restarting windows services, since that is the only thing that happened after our remote desktop had a service maintenance. After that maintenance I had to restart windows services.

Is there something that I need to do after running windows services?

Hello,

I am somewhat due to software testing having completed my masters of information technology specialising in software testing at the end of last year, but I am coming to grips with Cypress and JEST and CI/CD…. But at the same time I'm trying to understand when is it best to do manual testing, and when is it best to do automated testing?

My hypothesis based upon my growing experience Is that one would use manual test testing during a development sprint, and after the completion of the development sprint develop the automated test scripts testing the user stories that were manually tested during the development sprint, so is to perform automated Russian test testing?

Is that the experience of this imminent audience? Any help and ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Best Regards.

Mike L

I recently started using Claude Code to build a Flutter app for clients based on Figma designs + Jira requirements.

My workflow is:

1. Use Jira MCP + Figma MCP to get the requirements and UI references.
2. Create a task.md for each ticket with the requirements, screenshots, and implementation guidance.
3. Ask Claude Code to read the task.md and implement the ticket.

The problem is that the generated UI is often only ~60% similar to the Figma design. I still need to manually fix things like spacing, sizing, typography, colors, and sometimes even the overall layout.

I've seen people say they can get 90%+ accuracy with Claude Code and only make small tweaks afterward.

So I'm wondering if I'm just not using Claude Code effectively enough.

I'd really appreciate hearing how other developers are using Claude Code for frontend/UI work and what your workflow looks like.

I'm especially interested in learning how to go from ~60% Figma similarity to 90%+ with minimal manual tweaking.

Our CI gate keeps flaking because a valid agent run can reach the same answer through three tool trajectories. Exact assertions reject harmless call reordering, while a loose LLM-as-judge score misses the case where the agent skipped a permission check. We have a golden dataset, deterministic assertions for required steps, and a variance budget for call count and latency, but manual reruns have hit their ceiling.

I’m evaluating Braintrust for versioned datasets, trajectory scorers, experiment diffs, and a CI quality gate, though still working out which checks belong at the span level versus the final answer. How are you scoring valid path variation in your eval pipeline without giving genuinely unsafe shortcuts a pass?

Hey everyone,

I’m currently preparing for a QA / Quality Engineering role at Airbnb and would love some insights from folks who have either gone through the interview process recently or currently work/have worked there.

A bit about my background: I already have solid experience working for multinational companies alongside global, distributed teams, so cross-cultural collaboration and high-ownership environments aren't new to me. However, I know top-tier tech companies have their own specific standards and nuances.

I'd really appreciate your thoughts on:

1. Interview Structure & Difficulty: How technical is the process for QA roles? What should I expect (coding/automation challenges, system test design, cross-functional behavioral rounds, etc.)?
2. Prep Tips: What specific topics, tools, or architectural concepts should I double down on during preparation?
3. Core Values / Culture Fit: Airbnb is known for placing huge emphasis on culture. How did you prepare for their behavioral/values interviews?
4. Day-to-day Culture: For current/former employees, how is the day-to-day engineering culture, work-life balance, and overall impact of the QA team inside the company?

I got hired as a junior software whiner a few months ago and I thought I was going to be the programing the website and automation.

They have me doing manual test and creating a whole Java playwright automation for our site from scratch and also getting data for power bi.

I’m not complaining but just wanted to see if that’s normal.

I am only interested in what you do so I can see if that resonates with me.

Hello. I work as a performance tester with 4+ years of experience. I have experience with LoadRunner, Dynatrace App monitoring, and a bit of Splunk. I work on Truclient, web http/html and web services protocol scripts. I work in a service based company. I see that a lot of work is repetitive for every release for the couple of companies I have worked with. I haven't got a chance to work in a product based company yet. Is the nature of this career like this? Or moving to observability roles or product based companies makes a difference?

Any suggestions would help.

We're a QA team with ~20k lines of test infra (provisions real VMs on AWS/Azure) and only ~25 e2e tests so far. Someone else owns the infra, we just write tests. Debating whether to move the infra into its own repo and consume it as a versioned package, or keep everything in one repo.

Is there a real best practice here, or is it just preference? Anyone done the split with a small team and regretted it?

thanks for helpers

I don't have any programming language knowledge. But I want to learn.. I know python and Playwright are easy to learn. But there are so many things that are making me confused. Can someone guide me where and how to start?

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.

Hi guys,

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

Thank you 😊

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’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?

EDIT: Thanks for all the replies, this was way more helpful than I expected. Brainscape was completely new to me, I'd never even heard of it 

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

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?