Quality engineering
Traditional QA has historically sat at the end of a development cycle, testing what's already been built and reporting defects back to the people who built it. Quality engineering starts from a different position: quality is something the whole team is responsible for throughout, not something one team inspects for after the fact. A quality engineer often writes code alongside developers, builds and owns the automation framework a team's tests run on, and helps define what "done" actually means for a feature before it's built, not just verifies it once it is.
Day to day, that looks like integrating automated testing directly into a CI/CD pipeline rather than running it as a separate, later step, embedding checks like linting, static analysis, and coverage tracking into everyday development workflow, and showing up in design and requirements discussions early enough to catch a problem before any code exists to fix. Shift left testing, moving quality checks as early into the process as they can genuinely happen, is one of the core practices this discipline is built around.
The practical difference from a traditional tester role is mostly in the engineering skill it asks for. Building and maintaining test automation, owning tooling, and understanding how a system is actually architected takes a different skill set than manually executing a set of test cases against a finished build. The goal shifts too, less "find the bugs at the end" and more "make it structurally harder for the bug to happen at all."
What it typically involves
- Integrating automated testing directly into a CI/CD pipeline, rather than running it as a separate, later step.
- Participating in design and requirements discussions early, to catch a problem before any code is written.
- Owning test infrastructure and automation frameworks, not just executing manual test cases against a finished build.
- Embedding checks like linting, static analysis, and coverage tracking directly into everyday development workflow.
- Practicing shift left testing, moving quality checks as early in the process as they can genuinely happen.
Where it shows up
- A quality engineer pairing with a developer to write tests alongside a feature, rather than after it's finished.
- A team building and maintaining its own test automation framework instead of treating tooling as someone else's job.
- Quality metrics, like flaky test rate or time to detect a regression, tracked and acted on like any other engineering metric.
- A quality engineer flagging a risky design decision during planning, before it becomes an expensive bug to fix later.
Benefits and challenges
| Benefit | Challenge |
|---|---|
| Catches a problem where it's introduced, in design or code review, instead of where it's eventually discovered, in production. | Requires QA staff with real engineering skills, writing code and building tooling, not just executing test cases, which is a different hiring bar. |
| Spreads responsibility for quality across the whole team, instead of treating it as one team's job at the end. | Can blur ownership if it's adopted halfway, everyone being responsible for quality sometimes means no one actually owns catching a specific class of bug. |
| Reduces the cost of a defect, since fixing something during design or code review is far cheaper than fixing it after release. | Takes real cultural change, not just a title change, a team that keeps testing at the very end hasn't actually adopted the practice. |
Frequently asked questions
How is quality engineering different from traditional QA?
Traditional QA usually tests a feature after it's built, reporting defects back to development. Quality engineering treats quality as something built in throughout development, with quality engineers involved earlier, often writing code and owning automation and tooling rather than only executing test cases at the end.
Does quality engineering replace the QA role?
Not exactly, it's more of an evolution of it. Many organizations use the terms interchangeably, or transition existing QA roles toward quality engineering as they adopt more automation and shift testing earlier, rather than treating it as a separate function that replaces QA outright.
Do quality engineers need to write code?
Usually, yes. Building and maintaining test automation, integrating checks into a CI/CD pipeline, and contributing to tooling generally requires real engineering skill, which is one of the clearest practical differences from a purely manual testing role.
How Klarent helps
Klarent's AI agents take on a large share of the automation and maintenance work that a quality engineering team would otherwise build and own by hand, generating and repairing tests directly from a plain-language description of a flow.