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This is interesting and timely for me. We have a legendarily dysfunctional QA team at my company, and as the DevSecSREInfraPlatformOps manager, my biggest beef with them is that they have been killing our Lead Time to Release (time between dev having an idea and that idea getting released as a feature for customers). They manually test almost everything, do nonsensical "verifications" (mocking responses from external APIs when they could just... use the APIs), and don't know how to code at all. Dev and automated testing might finish in a few days, but QA takes 2-3 weeks(!) and they batch multiple changes together which confounds results. They have been given a half dozen opportunities to change and learn but they have always made excuses or refused. At one point they even had convinced a (former) director that they needed outsourced QA members to help with the workload -- and then promptly shifted 95% of their work to the outsourced QA!
Just this past week, I asked for a Claude Code account and started trying to vibe code a replacement for our QA team, partly out of curiosity, partly out of necessity (we have an OKR to reduce lead time), and just a little bit out of spite. I was not optimistic because this is a very poorly documented 10+ year old codebase cobbled together by devs who have all since resigned to escape the mess they've created.
First, I told Claude to pull down all the test suites described in Qase and cache them locally. Then I told it all of the paths to local copies of our frontend, backend, mobile, and infra repos. I asked it to analyze each one. Then, I asked it to begin writing tests for each Qase suite, starting with the simplest ones like "login." Sometimes it would get confused (it shows you its thinking) and I would interject a message (you can send messages while it's thinking, unlike other LLMs) to explain some important bit of knowledge. Eventually, after repeating the same info several times which had apparently gotten lost in the context window compaction process, I told it to create a file called TRIBAL.md to record all of these contextual bits I was telling it that were not evident from simply reading the code. I also had it write a CLAUDE.md that points to all the repos, instructs it to read and update TRIBAL.md, BUGS.md and TODO.md, and contains descriptions of other tools it has created for itself (helper functions, data seeding scripts, env vars and credentials, etc).
So far I don't think I've written a single line of code and it has automated 85% of web QA tests. I have had the test vetted by code rabbit and I plan to check them manually before release. I am quite impressed, though I'm still curious to see how it will try to handle mobile testing. Claude Code really is next level compared to Gemini, Copilot, or Grok.
All that said, I am very aware that this project is probably riddled with false assumptions and nonsense code. I am still not optimistic about the final result, although given how dire QA is, our director might try it out anyway just to see if we can reduce our dependence on them. Either way, it's been a good way to get familiar with a SOTA coding LLM.
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