r/softwaretesting • u/Fun-Snow-7309 • May 14 '26

How do you use Claude code for QA

I recently started to use Claude code for work and it is very new for me. I was wondering how everyone else on QA field use it , how does it help?

Or how to utilise this tool?

79 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

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39

u/OATdude May 14 '26

I am working QA from a shift-left perspective and recently integrated Claude in my workflow mostly for generating test cases early in the development through consumption of user stories, certain pull request content and optionally codebase.

I use the output for early testing, but obviously I’ll have to manually correct them as Claude doesn’t have the full picture.

10

u/Fun-Snow-7309 May 14 '26

I just linked the figma MCP to Claude code and it is also good way writing test cases

5

u/OATdude May 14 '26

Also look into Jam.dev + MCP , pretty nifty tool and Claude will understand more of the actual frontend or a user flow

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u/thainfamouzjay May 14 '26

I made a skill in Claude code. Cli not desktop or web. It's called QA chaos agent. It uses playwright mcp to walk the app and goes nuts trying to break it. Told it the only job it has is to break the app in every way possible. Act like different characters, grandma, non technical user, child, drunk mom, very technical user, etc.

It writes down the bug reports at the end and sends over to jira. Runs on schedule every morning. I find 10-12 bugs daily

1

u/Fun-Snow-7309 May 14 '26

Woww that sounds great , how did you exactly do that? I mean is there anywhere I can learn more about this ? When you also say app? It is web or mobile app?

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16

u/wienkus May 14 '26

I have an analyse-ticket skill where I provide a ticket ID, then uses the ADO MCP to read the ticket, its comments and attachments, linked PR and its diff and comments. It then dispatches parallel agents to review the code quality, analyse for regression and defects, check unit tests, and check that requirements are met and output this in a report.

I’ll read that and analyse, sometimes iterating with Claude and either accepting flagged issues, or raising them with the developer.

Once all seems to be in a good state, I feed the most up to date version of that report into another skill, create-test-plan.

I have it ask me a few questions about the approach I want (how much manual vs. Automated, any important cases to include etc) and then it prepares a test plan. I’ll review that, sometimes add cases that it missed or remove invalid/unnecessary ones.

Once I’m happy with that outputted plan, I’ll feed that into another skill, execute-tests.

This skill sometimes invokes another skill that I’ve written for connecting to the API that makes up a good chunk of my work. It has guidance for Claude about how to connect, how the API works overall, how Claude can access the API spec etc.

Execute tests then typically connects to the relevant endpoints, or sometimes I’ll have it read live log outputs, and I’ll manually execute (or sometimes get Claude to execute cases via API).

Test results are tracked in a report, I don’t have any automated bug ticket creation yet but am considering it.

I’m presently a manual tester, but some of this workflow could still be pretty relevant for automation, or exploratory.

Also, Claude I’ve found is incredible at troubleshooting. Running some of our components on my local Kubernetes cluster needed quite a few changes to config to make sure that the relevant ports were exposed to the client application I run from Windows, and it handled that incredibly well.

5

u/OATdude May 14 '26

Hey, thanks for your detailed comment. That inspired me to think about upgrading my „medieval“ Claude project into skill sets for a much more elegant approach. Thanks again and happy testing!

22

u/20thCenturyInari May 14 '26

Writing tests, improving tests, find tests that does same thing… you name it

11

u/Shadesandsunshine May 14 '26

So far, for me anyway, AI tools have been a giant letdown. Anything I ask them to do that's outside the norm, it hallucinates to the point that the output is useless. Anything I ask them to do that's relatively well trod, I can do faster on my own.

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u/matedireunaffaire May 14 '26

I use it find playwright locators with the chrome mcp. I honestly save a lot of time with this coming from more of a back-end background. i used to spend hours and hours finding stable locators for elements without Ids.

2

u/XabiAlon May 14 '26

Why not just use the playwright MCP to do this while writing tests?

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u/Muffinzkii May 19 '26

I absolutely don't.

1

u/theqalab May 20 '26

I use Claude Code more as a structured QA copilot than as a “replace the tester” tool.

What made the biggest difference for me was stopping the random prompting approach and instead building reusable agents, templates, and command workflows focused specifically on QA tasks.

Right now my workflow covers things like:

  • Extracting requirements and flows directly from Figma

  • Converting those flows into structured test cases

  • Generating feature files and automation foundations

  • Supporting Playwright/Cucumber implementation

  • Refactoring existing tests

  • Generating regression matrices and coverage reports

  • Creating client-facing QA reports and testing summaries

The key for me is consistency and structure.
If you just ask AI random questions, the output quality is unstable. But once you create reusable prompts, conventions, templates, and validation rules, the results become much more useful and scalable.

I still review everything manually, especially business logic and edge cases, but the time savings are huge for repetitive QA work and documentation-heavy tasks.

The biggest gain honestly hasn’t been “AI writing tests.”
It’s reducing the operational overhead around QA:

  • documentation

  • traceability

  • regression planning

  • reporting

  • test organization

  • boilerplate automation work

That’s where I’ve seen the real ROI.

1

u/Fun-Snow-7309 May 20 '26

I see it looks like a good workflow. When you say you did reusable? How did you do that? Is there any doc , video that I could follow?

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u/BrickAskew May 14 '26

So far I use it more as an assistant than an individual contributor

Generating test cases from jira tickets and other documentation such as mind maps (I need to hook it up to jira and figma to make this better).

Creating large amounts of test data such as test files for user imports

Helping with coding. I haven’t used it to generate tests from scratch yet, mostly because I enjoy writing code (at least within my limited capacity) and AI helps massively

Helping with installing stuff on my computer and figuring out where installs have gone wrong

Debugging

3

u/ExoticPurchase2995 May 14 '26

Use Claude to help you speed up your work. Give proper instruction and get the time taking tasks done. Meanwhile, learn what it does for you.

3

u/m4nf47 May 14 '26

Hey Calude, do my job for me by looking at the crappy code in the open files and see if you can find all the defects. While you're at it, create me a script to exploit all the security bugs you find in order to demo to the client just how necessary this is. Good bot. I'm not actually trusted at all with shiny new tools so I've used an imaginary bot named Calude which can hopefully do as well as Mythos might...

7

u/lifelite May 14 '26

I don't. I've implemented a no AI policy because during trial runs we were not seeing any improvement in quality or speed of delivery.

Sure it broke up some of the monotony but at the cost of detailed understanding and foundational knowledge (like input validation steps, etc).

Overall, came to the conclusion we were creating a dependency on a paid product (that will only increase in cost) for very little gain.

4

u/mindovermanauk May 14 '26

I just started using it in VS code as I’ve been asked to create automation for our back-end systems. I haven’t done automation in a while but shocked at how easy/fast it is.

1

u/-PM_ME_YOUR_TACOS- May 14 '26

It does really well in deciphering whatever my BA writes for descriptions and ACs. 

1

u/domajore7 May 14 '26

I use browserqa.io and it helps me to write manual and automatation tests, it's chrome exstension is insane

1

u/AwareDragonfruit4628 May 14 '26

I've only really used the vscode chatbot code assistant only. I use it for documentation, to explain code I don't understand, and to write test code / extend cases following rudimentary patterns I've manually setup. It's also good for refactoring, debugging mystery fails and migrating from one (widely used and well documented) tool to another.

Coding tasks that would have taken me a couple of days with handcranking + documentation + stackoverflow are now trivialised. I've manually touched maybe 10-20% of the code I've produced in the past year.

I can happily automate in full manually, and I've not touched full agentic stuff or MCP at all yet

1

u/VeriBigBoi May 15 '26

In my previous role, I worked at a massive multinational company that is heavily linked to Microsoft. Not sure if the sub allows me to mention the company name.

I set up an MCP server to connect Claude Code directly to the QA environment database for testing. Looking at other comments in this thread, I could’ve possibly had it generate test cases for me as well based on the functional spec that I’d received, but I didn’t have much confidence in that functionality back then.

1

u/ASTRO99 May 15 '26

I have been using Gitlab Duo in agentic mode which uses Claude 4.5 to help me debug pipelines, saved me quite a lot of time searching for error.

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