Over the last 15 years, many companies phased out QA teams.
The idea: everyone is responsible for quality.
That pushed developers to write more tests, and tooling improved a lot.
But here’s the catch: high coverage doesn’t always mean high quality.
Coverage Isn’t Enough
Let’s take a simple example:
class User < ApplicationRecord
def initials
name.scan(/\b\w/).join
end
end
With one test you can hit 100% coverage. Add a second for a negative case, and you’re done… right?
Not really.
If the name is José Ángel, this method only returns J.
If it’s 佐藤 陽翔, it returns nothing.
Coverage reports look perfect. The user experience does not.
What’s Missing: Test Design
When QA teams disappeared, we lost something important: structured test design.
Most of us never formally learned it—we picked up “write some unit tests” or “learn a framework.”
But test design is about asking bigger questions:
- What really matters for the user?
- Which risks are worth testing for?
- Which cases are most important to cover systematically?
Without that, testing becomes a numbers game: just write more tests.
Good testing isn’t about more tests. It’s about the right tests.
And that’s a skill every developer can (and should) learn.
👉 This is a shortened version of a longer article where I go deeper into:
- How QA teams vanished
- Why developers need testing skills
- Practical starting points for learning test design
Read the full article here at https://goodenoughtesting.com/articles/what-we-lost-when-qa-teams-dissapeared
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