Enterprise QA Playbook – Issue #1
Does Enterprise QA Even Exist Anymore?
Hello Readers 👋,
Welcome to the very first issue of Enterprise QA Playbook — a newsletter dedicated to elevating the conversation around Quality Assurance in enterprise systems like OMS, TMS, and WMS.
In this issue, I want to challenge a question I’ve often found myself asking:
Does Enterprise QA even exist anymore?
Has it been quietly replaced by development-led testing, automated test suites, or code coverage dashboards?
🔍 The Cultural Shift in QA
Today, QA seems to have been narrowed down to mobile apps, UI validations, or consumer-facing testing. But in my experience, Enterprise QA is not just about testing code, builds, or the final product — it's a culture. A mindset.
It’s something that permeates the organization. It's not owned by a team, but felt by everyone.
If it ships, it must be tested.
That’s the mindset we’re missing.
🧯 What Went Wrong?
In the pursuit of cost-cutting, efficiency, and metrics like “90% code coverage,” QA has been reduced to a checkbox.
We don’t ship tested code anymore — we just deploy it.
And in many organizations, poor Agile implementation has made things worse. Leadership assumes QA is “already built-in” after years of maturity, so dedicated processes are phased out. But the reality is far from it.
Even enterprise customers no longer expect top-tier quality. They’ve grown used to escalations being part of the experience.
🧠 Why Tools Can’t Replace Human Judgment
We’ve tried to automate a cultural process using:
Jira checklists
Unit tests
Code coverage tools
None of these are wrong — but they can’t replace human judgment. That emotional instinct to say:
“This doesn’t feel right — let's hold this release.”
🚧 What We Need: The New QA Gatekeeper
We don’t need to go backward or build new teams.
We need to raise our expectations of quality and bring back gatekeeping as a mindset.
A true QA culture is about evaluating, questioning, and validating — at every stage:
Requirements
Design
Testing
Performance
Support
The QA Gatekeeper asks questions others miss.
They read between the lines.
They notice patterns from past defects.
They speak up when others nod along.
They bring emotion + intelligence to software quality.
💭 Final Thought
QA can’t be fully automated.
It requires people who care — and who ask better questions before our customers are forced to.
Let’s bring that culture back.