5 ways to protect your QA job from AI and off-shoring

Why do we even need to worry about this?

Many of the world's largest economies have seen stunted growth for the last few years, and shareholders want profits. Companies that are struggling are looking to shred staffing costs, and the ones that aren't still want to maximize profits.

This brings me to number 1 on this list...

1 - Understand the company you work for!

Is your employer struggling? Are layoffs being announced? Has your employer brought in policies typically correlated with encouraging employees to look elsewhere? Things like pay rise freezes or reducing remote working.

Understanding your company will give you a vital heads-up and tell you if the company is interested in innovation. If you see innovation in other departments, then you know there's an appetite to increase efficiency. Suggest a way to increase output and/or decrease costs. Not only will this show your initiative, but if done right, it will nicely position you as this project's lead.

2 - Be the person who cares

I've been in many engineering meetings across many companies. The funny thing is you see slightly different versions of the same people. There are the people who talk a good game but have never seen one of their tickets reach the done column, there's the work culture hippy, but most annoyingly, there's the person disguising laziness as pragmatism, basically suggesting not doing anything is the quickest and safest option.

If you're lucky, there are a few people who genuinely care. If you're watching or reading this, this is you. But that doesn't mean others will see you this way. To be a "person who cares," you must regularly speak up and champion quality.

3 - Rock solid regression

One day, I will do a whole video on the problems of in-sprint testing, but for now, let me just say I'm aware of the stresses and struggles many exploratory and automation testers face as you get closer to the end of sprint.

On the one hand, you give items the time they need, but you're now the "QA bottleneck." On the other hand, you keep the tickets flowing, but quality may suffer.

Whether in automation or exploratory testing, an automated CI/CD regression pack is your best friend. If it fails, great. You can push that ticket back and have more time on another ticket.

If it passes, great. Now you know the ticket hasn't broken anything "old" so you can get on with testing the new stuff.

4 - Share your reports!

This is such a simple but almost entirely overlooked area. What is the output of a developer? Well, we can look at tickets and see which features they developed.

What's the output of a QA? "Better quality", it's not something you can see. In fact, I'd argue you can't see "quality"; you can only notice the lack of it.

In the same way, you wouldn't think a table in a showroom is clean, but you would notice if it's dirty. It's the same in software engineering; people are far more aware of the defects that slipped through the net than everything you caught.

Get in the habit of sharing your reports; again, this doesn't matter if you're exploratory or automation; share something. Your reports should be available to everyone at all times, but you should give a written and verbal summary once a sprint. Keep it short, but remind people what QA is doing and remind the company of what they'll be exposed to without you.

5 - Stop holding yourself back

AI, off-shoring, and other tools are just ways to give companies what they want. Staff are expensive, and companies would like to magically get all of the benefits of their staff, plus a bunch of new ones, and they'd really like it all for less.

You might have your own goals; maybe you're on a journey to becoming a developer. Maybe you like current ways of working and pace? These are fine, but this means your goals don't align with your employers.

If they want faster, better, cheaper, give it to them!

It'll be much better for you if you're in the discussions. Investigate AI tools; maybe they'll work for you, perhaps they won't, but you can provide a write-up on the pros and cons. What about codeless tooling, like DoesQA, with a proven track record of empowering good testers to do so much more while reducing runner costs? - Ok, that's the plug over.

In Conclusion

We hate hearing that the QA teams have been off-shored, but it all starts to make sense when we find out why.

The company wanted to save money and saw no innovation in the QA team for years.

The QA staff had already felt distant from the engineering team and were a bottleneck each sprint.

There was nothing tangible proving the QA team's value, and "magic AI tool" or "off-shore" sounded like a silver bullet.