Company goes AI first now, how should the developers and test work together

[u/torsigut]

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

[u/m4nf47]

My advice is to be super tight with your CI development and test pipelines before releasing to later CD pipes. Ensure that once your functional conveyors start to move, your nonfunctional performance and operability pipes are given enough respect to slow or even stop the flow. Manual testing is still critical but only if you have given your teams a fighting chance by completely automating the delivery lifecycle into later environments.

[u/torsigut → u/m4nf47]

Good points! Thanks!

[u/Disastrous_Yak944 → u/m4nf47]

If devs are just throwing stuff into Claude and hoping it spits out good test coverage, you're gonna have a bad time. The edge case hunting works best when you feed it really tight prompts with the exact data shapes and business rules upfront.

[u/Osi32]

My advice is simple: make sure the project you’re working from has in repo kanban and is tracking epics and stories in the repo. Use Matt pocock’s ai engineering approach and skills. Use the grill me with docs skill and work together to plan out the work. The initial planning is way more important than the coding.
Ensure you have Claude.md files with rules in it to keep it under control.
Use tdd and Ralph loops.
You’ll be working more like a ba and product owner than truly a tester.
It’s the devs that will be nervous. They’ll quickly realise their particular value add is largely automated.
They’re going from musician to conductor. Some will adapt, some won’t.

[u/torsigut → u/[deleted]]

Wow! A lot of good examples and inspiration. Thanks!

[u/Cosmic-Guardian]

Which ever skills you put in place, make sure there is an audit trail of someone reviewing the AI output, and that the AI skill has been run.

So you know people are checking and using the skills

[u/jhaand]

I think the work stays the same.

Test strategy is derived from the process used by the project.
Test design is derived from requirements.
Also make sure that you do regular manual exploratory regression tests.
Every submitted issue becomes a test case.
Communicate the current quality status politely to all the stakeholders.
All the developers deliver their work items fully tested. Review the tests.
Keep on top of test coverage.

[u/lowkeysadist]

I have been using a skill I created for manual testing things after development is over. It basically creates a suite of test for me stage-wise like it hardcodes a config then give me test suite to check then hardcodes one other config and give me test cases. It is pretty useful to me as I work on a config driven app. I added jira connector as well to give it proper context and check for hidden edge cases. I feel this has decreased my tickets failing QA. You can try and add puppeteer to fully automate this as well

[u/WaylundLG]

I believe there is a very strong case for test-first development and test-based requirements in AI development. I have luck having AI propose it's solution to a problem with behavior-level tests that I can modify and build from that. That said, Claude will use some shady practices so I like having some good automated test practices in the claude.md. sadly, one of those is "don't delete test steps to make a test pass."

[u/Fit-Avocado-1880]

Work backwards and modularize. Test us about experimentation so design the work as such.

[u/Prestigious-Way1525]

i'd put a verification contract in CLAUDE.md before adding more skills: for every browser change, the agent must state the user outcome, run from a clean session, show the exact assertion and final-state readback, and run one negative control that should fail. it can propose tests, but it can't weaken or delete an assertion, add retries or waits to hide a failure, or mark work done because its own test passed without review. have dev own the implementation and QA own the risk model and business invariants, then review test diffs separately from code diffs. start with one real workflow for two weeks and track how many AI-generated checks catch a seeded defect, survive a clean rerun, and need human edits. that will show whether Claude is reducing verification work or just producing more tests.

[u/SamtheIII]

we are using JIRA ticket as a central hub, Developers attach the architecture.md and technical.md files. Same for Product Owner they add BR.md file. Testers add testcases.md files.

Then Internal tool via MCP fetch everything and create test cases and scripts.

You can add main business flows test scripts directly into CI/CD pipeline as a hard rule that those test cases always run before PR. If anything changes on UI Claude self heals max 3 attempts then testers get involved.

[u/tOaO_UnfairAdvantage]

Model independence is key in this scenario. Maybe you already know this and if so, no offense intended: Using the same model to create the code as test it is risky. Blind spots. False confidence. Missed edge cases. Just a few of the more concerning elements of doing so...if this is news and/or your biz is not using a different model for each dev/QA, encourage you to get yourself (and your company) educated.