What Successful QA Teams Do Differently

Anyone who’s shipped a system with anything more complex than a login screen knows the pain of long forms, multi-step flows, conditional fields, and reusable validation rules that will break at some point. And yet, most of us still test these flows manually every single time.

Fill the inputs → Tap “Next” → Miss a required field → Fix it → Send → Catch an error → Fix it again → Repeat

Besides being slow and boring, this process burns a ton of development time. It slows down releases and does not guarantee code quality. When something breaks while being reused in another part of the codebase, you often don’t even know it happened. Clearly, manual testing alone seems unreliable in practice.

By the end of this article, you will understand:

• Why quality assurance (QA) should be implemented early and often;
• How to prioritize tests and focus on critical features and flows;
• How to make developer teams move faster and with more confidence;
• How to measure QA impacts and results.

Successful QA Teams’ Mindset

The main thing to keep in mind is that successful QA teams don’t see quality as a final step in development.

Let’s break down what this mindset looks like in practice: why it matters, what we should do to support it, and how to put all this theory into practice.

The Why: Taking Care of the Bugs Before They Even Show Up

As mentioned, QA is often treated as the final checkpoint, but it shouldn’t be like that. Writing tests first (or at least while developing) is the secret to delivering software without waiting for bugs to appear. The issue isn’t only the time wasted manually filling out forms that are likely to break; it’s also the reason why methodologies like TDD (Test-Driven Development) exist in the first place.

The What: Getting Insights to Improve Your QA Strategy

Even if your development team doesn’t have a dedicated QA squad, ensuring code quality isn’t impossible. The key is in being intentional about what you want to test and what you don’t. You can get these insights in one of the product meetings with your team simply by asking the following questions:

• Where are bugs most likely to occur?
• Which flows are critical?
• Which features impact users the most?
• Which components will be reused in other parts of the codebase?
• Which areas of the product repeatedly break or fail to get a definitive fix?

It’s also just as important to remember that testing everything is a waste of time. Not all tests provide the same value, which is why you should follow with another set of questions:

• Which tests are likely to break with any UI or logic change?
• Which parts rarely break and don’t impact critical flows?

And just like that, you’ll know what to do. Now let’s see how you can turn that clarity into action.

The How: Putting the Theory Into Practice

There are many ways to test your system today. And, depending on the technologies your software uses, you can even combine multiple approaches. I am going to list a few of them below:

• E2E (end-to-end) tests: With these, you can test entire flows from the user’s perspective. They can open your browser and interact with your system just like a real user would by clicking, scrolling, and filling out the forms. They can also verify that elements, text, and colors appear on the screen as expected. Essentially, you get to see everything as a real user would.
• Unit tests: These focus on individual functions or modules, ensuring each piece of code behaves as expected in isolation. Give it X, and expect Y as a result. If one day the answer becomes “no,” the good news is you’ll be the first to know, not your users.
• Integration tests: These tests ensure that different modules of your application (database, controllers, services) work together correctly, catching issues that unit tests alone might miss.
• Automated tests platforms: If manual tests still feel like a chore for you, this is your solution. Tools like QA.tech autonomously explore your application, generate test cases, and keep them up to date with every single change in your product. Instead of requiring you to write every script yourself, QA.tech learns your app’s flows, simulates real user behavior, and runs tests continuously in your CI/CD pipelines. You get true E2E coverage without your team writing a single line of code (beyond the initial setup, of course).

Measuring the Results and Showing ROI (Return on Investment)

QA is about more than just peace of mind. It actually lets you track measurable results. These metrics will also show your team that their effort was worth it. The outcome is less stress and more recognition for the work they’ve done.

Here’s how you can pull it off. Start by tracking bugs reported every week. This simple metric will help you calculate how much time your team has saved by preventing bugs before they’v reached users. It will also give you a clear measure of quality based on how many issues are reported by end users.

The next thing to consider is release velocity. How long did it take your team to ship a feature while manually testing each step, such as filling long forms, catching errors, and fixing them over and over again? With automated testing, all you need to do is write the test, develop the feature, and run your test with just a single CLI line run test.... That’s it, you re done.

Which brings me to my next point: hours saved can be a really good quantitative metric to bring up at the end-of-quarter meetings or when planning the next milestone. This also translates directly into how much money your team is saving by working smarter, not harder.

Case Study: How Pricer Has Transformed Their QA by Using QA.tech

Now, here’s a real-life example, to show you that everything we’ve said so far actually works.

Pricer, one of our clients, managed to save approximately 390 hours per quarter through smarter QA testing. If you are good with numbers (or even just a little familiar with finance), you will know that this translates into significant savings.

Challenges

Before implementing QA.tech, Pricer faced several issues despite the QA strategy they had already applied. Tests would break even with minor UI or logic changes, and critical flows were often left uncaught. Their small QA team could only cover so much, which left gaps in testing. The delivery cycles were also slow, and recurring bugs still reached production, which frustrated their users.

Game-Changing Results

By analyzing Pricer’s challenges through the lens of what you’ve learned in this post, it’s clear they may have missed the “What” step (that is, identifying what is truly important to test), even though they understood the importance of QA and applied unit, integration, and E2E tests.

So, in order to put an end to their recurring headaches, they turned to the last (and potentially the best) option on our “How” list: they switched to automated tests using QA.tech, which is smart enough to detect both UI and API changes.

And believe me, the impact was immediate. They were able to increase coverage even with a small QA team. Pricer saved approximately 390 hours per quarter, which allowed engineers to focus more on developing new features rather than maintenance. Their confidence in releases also improved, even when features were complex.

Conclusion

It doesn’t matter if you are a developer, a tech lead, or a curious CEO desperate to improve the many bugs in your software. Try the practices outlined in this blog post with your team, and let me know what the results were (since you now have the tools to do that, too). I’m looking forward to hearing what you’ve achieved!

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