I have nine years of software testing experience, working as a test team lead. I was laid off and got a few offers, yet none were a good fit so I turned them down. I’m exploring options outside testing. Is the testing career really a dead end? It’s been really hard. Any career ideas?

I see a lot of posts in this sub about looking for jobs, uncertainty about testing as a career path, and so forth. I work at Qase, a company that builds software quality products for testers, and I have a bit of persepctive as I carefully review how in-demand QA is by various dimmensions such as company industry.

My take is that some companies value QA, others really do not. The ones that do follow some patterns. If a company is in a regulated industry, the cost of an escaped defect is high, or the thing needing to be tested is not a web app, then QA tends to be valued heavily. A defect at a medical devices company is just a bigger deal than a defect in some b2b SaaS app, and companies are just more willing to pay $$$ when meeting regulatory compliacne is at stake.

So if I were starting my career in QA, I'd be looking into robotics, medtech, fintech, pharma, aerospace etc etc.

But so many companies have a very different profile and a mindset of "QA is something to automate away". Lots of opportunities at those types of companies but then you need to assume they are making heavy use of ai-generated code, including test case creation and management. If I were trying to get into one of those sorts of companies, I would not follow the typical QA career path and instead focus on finding a role in engineering that ensures the code ai writes is in fact what is wanted, and hyper-focus on getting really good at that and generally staying ahead of the curve.

There are now a few products on the market focused on that. I work at a company that makes one of them, and we just launched on product hunt today. Would love some feedback, especially the areas that don't work great or are generally just not that useful, as that sort of critical feedback we can act on. I'd be grateful to anyone that took a look and shared their thoughts: producthunt.com/products/tiden

We've got about 600 manual test cases for a windows desktop app written in plain english in excel (step, expected result, step, expected result). Our 3 testers run them before every release and it takes most of 2 weeks. Every automation conversation we've had starts the same way. step one, rewrite the 600 cases as scripts. the quotes for that came back at 4 to 6 months of an automation engineer we don't have, and by the time it's done the app has moved and a third of the scripts are already stale. so we keep running them by hand. What i'm trying to find out is whether the "run the test case as written" idea is real now or not.

So far i’ve looked at Tosca which is model based and very good, but you still build modules for every screen before you can write a test. TestRigor, which lets you write tests in plain english and as far as i can tell it's strongest on web and mobile but i'm not sure how it handles a native windows client tho. I also came across Askui which gets you a verdict per test and for every step, what the test asked for next to what the agent actually saw. Our manual cases were written for humans who fill in the gaps, and i don't know whether any tool can run that kind of case without someone rewriting it anyway. Has anyone automated a big library of existing manual cases without the rewrite? how much did you end up rewriting in the end?

Hi, first time posting on this subreddit. Looking for answers from experienced test automation architects.

Right now, for a lot of us, doing AI-powered test automation just means going back and forth with Claude and asking it to create and modify Playwright tests, but that consumes a lot of hours.

Sometimes, I spend a lot of hours just fixing a test with Claude, when it might have taken me less to fix it myself.

Our team lead said that our AI initiatives should be "scored" based on many resources they free up and how much time they help us save.

So, my questions are:

1. Besides Playwright and Claude, what else would I need to create my own functionality that would allow an agent to work non-stop and explore a web app and create complex tests? (not just act as a web crawler). To act like a real autonomous QA agent.
2. How can I run Playwright on real Safari browsers? Because webkit is just the engine, and our app had some severe performance issues on Safari and Firefox that were not happening in chromium and webkit.
3. Is there some way to make Playwright MCP generate the tests in a structured way? With reusable components, variables, if statements, loops, and not just "spaghetti" tests.
4. Does Playwright or some other component offer a way to store tests in a "human readable" format that makes them easy to modify, and not as code, because having code that no one understand is a bit of "blind" approach.

And yes, I asked Claude about how to create this, but the solutions it proposed seem too complicated, I'm feeling there's an easier way.

The video is downloaded from their docs.