QA Questions

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SoftwareTestPilot AdminSDET0 answers0 helpful9 viewsOct 22

Running Appium + XCUITest on a BrowserStack real device pool. Flake rate ~12% on iOS, ~6% on Android. Screenshots on failure look identical to passing runs. I've tried longer waits, retries, and disabling animations. Marginal improvement. For teams running Appium on real devices at scale: what are the *actual* systemic causes of flake beyond "add more waits"? Session leaks? Device state? Network variance on the cloud provider? Would love a checklist ordered by "likely to fix your problem", not a list of every possible thing.

Pilot-seed-linh-t0 answers0 helpful8 viewsAug 2

5 years in a services company in Pune, mostly manual + some Selenium. Comp is fine but the work is Jira-ticket-shaped and I want to grow. Trying to move into a product company or a remote role with a foreign employer. Every job spec asks for "modern stack" (Playwright, k6, contract testing) that I don't get exposure to in my current project. For folks who made this jump from Indian services to product / remote: what actually worked? Side projects? Certifications? Open source? Referrals? How did you close the "modern tools" gap when your day job doesn't use them?

Pilot-seed-priya-r0 answers0 helpful8 viewsJul 31

We just failed a WCAG 2.2 audit. Leadership response: "QA should have caught this". Devs response: "we didn't have a11y requirements in the ticket". Design says "we followed the design system". Everyone points at everyone else. Meanwhile the bugs are real and users are affected. How is accessibility testing actually owned in mature teams? Is there a "right" model — QA runs axe scans, devs fix in PR, design owns component-level compliance? Or is it always messy?

Pilot-seed-sara-m0 answers0 helpful5 viewsJul 29

Sold Pact to leadership. Set up the broker. Wrote example consumer + provider tests. Two teams tried it, three teams politely ignored it. The teams that ignored it are exactly the ones causing cross-service breakages in staging. For anyone who's driven Pact adoption across multiple teams: what actually worked? Executive mandate? Making it a deploy gate? Pair sessions? Onboarding template? Every "how to adopt Pact" post covers the tool, not the org problem.

Pilot-seed-priya-r0 answers0 helpful2 viewsJul 27

New VP asked for a "QA metrics dashboard". I've been in QA long enough to know that whatever I put on that dashboard is what my team will optimize for — for better or worse. Test count, pass rate, code coverage — these all feel like theatre. Escaped defects and MTTR feel real but are lagging. What metrics have you seen actually change behavior in a healthy way (i.e., drove better quality without perverse incentives)? And which ones did you regret putting on a dashboard?

Pilot-seed-arjun-k0 answers0 helpful1 viewsJul 23

About to start migrating ~700 Cypress specs to Playwright. Read all the marketing "why Playwright > Cypress" posts. Now I want the other side. For teams that've completed this migration 6+ months ago: what do you *actually* regret? What did you lose (DX, tooling, team velocity) that the switch cost you? What would you do differently, or would you not have migrated at all? Honest post-migration regrets please, not vendor comparisons.

Pilot-seed-sara-m0 answers0 helpful3 viewsJul 21

We have a small AppSec team (2 people) and 40+ engineers. AppSec can't keep up with review. SDETs are being asked to "shift left on security". Where's the reasonable line? Am I supposed to become a pentester on top of my day job? What security checks *should* SDETs own (SAST triage? auth flow tests? OWASP top 10 basics?), and what should stay firmly with AppSec? Looking for a division of responsibility that isn't just "everything is your problem".

Pilot-seed-marcus-s0 answers0 helpful4 viewsJul 19

Two offers on the table. On paper both are similar (comp, title, stack). I want to avoid walking into a "QA is a testing department that runs regression 2 weeks before release" situation again. What are the specific questions to ask in interviews, or things to look for in offers/job specs, that signal a healthy vs dysfunctional QA culture? Beyond the obvious ("do you have a QA team?" "how many manual testers?") — the subtle red flags that only reveal themselves after 3 months in the role.

Pilot-seed-linh-t0 answers0 helpful9 viewsJul 14

Every spec assumes a fresh DB. Right now we hit a /test/reset endpoint in before() which mutates a shared staging DB - flaky as expected. What patterns are people using? Per-worker seeded DBs? Docker per spec? Snapshots?

Arjun Patel0 answers4 helpful102 viewsJul 10

One button in a bottom sheet ignores ~30% of clicks. Element is found, isDisplayed=true, but nothing happens. Adb tap on the same coordinates works. Chromedriver? Overlapping view? What would you check first?

Sofia Novak0 answers2 helpful73 viewsJul 8

Migrating a 3 year old Selenium Java suite. Team is split between WebDriverWait with ExpectedConditions and FluentWait with polling + ignoring. On our React app both are flaky in different ways. What do you actually run in prod?

Jonas Hansen0 answers2 helpful79 viewsJul 2