From QA to QE | Why Quality Needs a Seat at the Strategy Table
As development cycles accelerate and user expectations soar in today’s high-stakes development environment, traditional quality assurance (QA) approaches are falling short because they are unable to match the speed, complexity, or demands of modern software delivery.
Many teams continue to rely on testing practices designed for a different era, processes that once served well but now introduce risk and delay. Before teams can modernize their approach, it’s important to understand the underlying friction points in traditional QA that lead to increased go-to-market times, higher defect rates, and lost customer trust.
What’s Holding QA Back?
Siloed Testing, Misaligned Priorities
Traditional QA operates in isolation, disconnected from broader business objectives and customer needs. Teams often focus their testing efforts on low-value features rather than critical user pathways and customer-facing functionality that directly impact business success. This misalignment creates dangerous blind spots in product quality. Problems that should be caught during development only surface when users encounter them in production, leading to costly fixes and damaged user experience.
The disconnect between QA strategy and business goals also generates communication breakdowns between development, QA, and product teams. Without comprehensive quality metrics tied to strategic objectives, teams lack a clear picture of product quality needed to assess readiness for release, leading to potential business impact in terms of revenue and branding.
Lack of Process Innovation
Traditional QA remains stuck in a task-oriented mindset, with teams mechanically executing predetermined test cases and following established procedures without questioning their effectiveness. The focus is just on finding defects during execution and not preventing them. This rigid approach stifles innovation and prevents teams from adapting their testing strategies to evolving product needs and market demands.
The result is a reactive quality culture that only responds when problems surface in production. Teams lack the analytical frameworks needed to identify root causes of recurring issues, leading to repetitive firefighting instead of proactive problem prevention. This cycle wastes resources and fails to build organizational learning. Furthermore, traditional QA lacks effective mechanisms to manage the team’s productivity, value, efficiency, and accuracy, resulting in limited visibility into team performance and missed opportunities for strategic improvement.
No Feedback Loops and Actionable Metrics
One of traditional QA teams' most critical flaws is that they are not well integrated with development, product, and business functions, and thus, do not have feedback loops that could inform testing strategies and improve overall product quality. There’s also the lack of real-time metrics. They may track basic numbers like test cases executed or bugs found, but these metrics don't provide actionable insights to guide strategy or business impact, nor establish a baseline for improvement. Without comprehensive data or trends to drive decisions around QA project management, teams struggle with over or under-testing, wrong priorities, and slow velocity. They cannot justify tool investments for improvements, leading to inefficient resource allocation and missed opportunities for strategic enhancement and risk mitigation.
The QE Advantage: Engineering for Quality
To meet today’s demands for speed, innovation, and reliability, QA must evolve into quality engineering (QE). Transitioning from traditional QA to modern QE isn’t about replacing one process with another but evolving how quality is built, measured, and embedded into the entire development lifecycle. The following five shifts illustrate how organizations can move from reactive testing practices to proactive, business-aligned QE.
1. From Reactive Testing to Proactive Metrics
Traditional QA teams execute tests without deep insight into testing performance or effectiveness. They may know how many tests passed or failed but lack understanding of whether they're testing the right things or catching the right problems.
Modern QE professionals prioritize testing based on business risk and customer experience, elevating this approach by tracking comprehensive metrics including defect clustering patterns, escape rates, meaningful test coverage, and defect validity rates. They utilize quality dashboards and data analysis to guide strategic decisions on testing priorities, implementing predictive analytics to identify risks early and optimizing testing strategies before issues impact users. The data helps with the creation of a mitigation plan for the risks identified. This data-driven methodology ensures that quality efforts align with what matters most to users and the business while continuously improving overall product quality.
2. From Generic Coverage to Business-Aligned Strategy
Traditional QA often relies on generic test plans that treat all features equally, regardless of business importance or user impact.
QE engineers build risk-based testing strategies that align with business-critical areas, ensuring testing resources focus on what matters most to users and the business. These approaches are supported by comprehensive dashboards that inform release readiness decisions and clearly communicate business impact. Strategies such as release risk scoring guide final go/no-go decisions by the business and give them confidence in the positive impact of the release.
Beyond strategy development, QE engineers continuously examine and optimize testing processes from the ground up, designing and building systems that enable scalability and adaptability. Using AI-powered automation and CI/CD will help with test coverage and a more holistic approach to testing. They treat quality processes as products that require ongoing innovation and refinement, creating sustainable frameworks that evolve with business needs.
3. From Siloed Teams to Strategic Partnership
Traditional QA often works with limited collaboration with product management and development teams, learning about requirements indirectly and discovering issues only after implementation decisions have been made. The waterfall model failed because testing happened after all design and development was completed, giving no way to prevent defects from the start of the requirements process.
Modern QE takes a fundamentally different approach by embedding directly within cross-functional teams, working collaboratively with product, development, and operations teams to share insights that shape product quality through informed decision-making. This is what we call the shift-left approach. This partnership approach establishes continuous feedback loops with product owners and stakeholders throughout the development lifecycle, ensuring that quality considerations influence product decisions from conception through delivery. Requirement gaps are identified much ahead of time, giving business time to assess what they expect from the product. The time taken to fix defects is a lot less, making this a more cost-effective way of testing.
4. From Issue Documentation to Prevention Engineering
While traditional QA focuses on logging bugs after they occur, QE emphasizes comprehensive root cause analysis and strategic process improvements to prevent recurring issues. Rather than simply documenting what went wrong, QE engineers investigate why problems occurred and implement systematic changes to reduce the likelihood of similar issues in the future. By grounding their approach in clearly defined business needs and data-driven metrics, QE teams help prevent recurring mistakes and drive continuous improvement. QE minimizes the time and cost associated with fixing issues by addressing their root causes early in the development process. This concept of issue prevention has led to improved release quality and key learnings on how to work more effectively and collaboratively.
5. From Manual Execution to AI-Powered Automation
Traditional QA relies heavily on manual test execution, which limits both speed and coverage while consuming significant human resources on repetitive tasks.
QE leverages AI-powered tools to automate routine testing activities, freeing team members to focus on exploratory testing, root cause analysis, and strategic quality assessment. Modern QE utilizes intelligent automation that self-heals and even generates test cases and test data. This enables human teams to drive strategic quality decisions and focus on high-value activities that require creativity and critical thinking, while driving substantial time and cost savings. Additionally, the adoption of low-code and no-code AI testing tools makes it easier for non-technical stakeholders to contribute to the quality process, further accelerating and democratizing test development.
QE as Strategic Evolution
The shift from traditional QA to modern QE represents more than an upgrade in tools or processes. It is an evolution toward more collaborative, data-informed, and strategic quality practices. Teams that successfully make this evolution don't just ship software faster—they build lasting customer trust, reduce technical debt, and create sustainable competitive advantages through strategic quality engineering.
Modern QE positions quality as a strategic capability that designs success into products from day one rather than attempting to test problems at the end of the development cycle. By embracing the strategic shifts outlined above, teams can transform quality from a bottleneck into an accelerator.
Build Quality into Your Product Lifecycle with Myridius
Transitioning to modern quality engineering requires expertise, strategic planning, and the right partnership. At Myridius, we leverage the "Just Enough Quality" philosophy to balance speed, cost, and quality for maximum impact. Our tailored solutions, from performance testing to automated QA, mitigate risk while accelerating delivery.
Don't let outdated QA practices hold back your competitive advantage. Contact us today to discover how Myridius Quality Engineering expertise can help you transform your approach to building resilient, quality-driven products.
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