[nishilpatel]

QA as we know it will shrink. Thinking will not.

AI will kill flaky UI scripts, and “click-and-verify” roles. That’s overdue. What won’t disappear is the need to understand how systems actually behave under stress, failure, and ambiguity.

The future of QA is upstream: • defining invariants, not writing scenarios • modeling state and failure modes, not chasing bugs • debugging distributed, async, messy real-world systems

AI will generate tests faster than humans ever can. But it won’t know what matters or what assumption is wrong. That judgment still belongs to engineers.

If you’re in QA and want to stay relevant: stop being a test executor. Become the person who explains why the system broke, not just how to reproduce it.

[hexbin010]

> The future of QA is upstream

I've heard this theory a lot - and it's been around a while now. But only seen them made redundant, or forced to become normal software devs.

Do you know of any companies that have converted a large chunk of legacy QA teams to this proposed model?

[zjimy82]

Upstream means Shiftleft in better words, we follow from while back , but yet not get solid success to automate mundane flows, Using Playwright MCP a lot , but always worried about unknown unknown zone before every release.