What If There Were No QA Departments?
- Travis Coleman
- Nov 21
- 6 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Let me start by saying this is probably going to be my longest article. This topic simply cannot be wrapped up in a page or two, but I will do my best to keep it grounded and readable. I read hundreds of articles every year on quality across a mix of industries and maturity levels. I compare the patterns, the pain points, the promises, and the hype. I pay attention to the subtle shifts that signal where quality is heading and how leaders should prepare for the next disruption.
Lately I have noticed one theme popping up more often than I expected. There is a growing belief among some executives that we may be entering the final decade of dedicated QA departments. That idea is spreading fast enough that it deserves a closer look, especially from people who have spent their careers studying the discipline.
As a senior member of the American Society of Quality, here’s a research-driven, experience-informed exploration of what this future might actually look like for software businesses, for the executives who lead them, and for the users who live with the outcomes.
What the research is signaling
Across thought pieces, analyst notes, and tech leadership blogs, a trend appears: the claim that QA roles are declining because automation, AI based validation, and developer owned testing are becoming the primary safety net. Some articles paint this as an evolution toward efficiency. Others frame it as an inevitable response to rising engineering costs. A few describe it as part of the long term shift to autonomous delivery pipelines.
But these pieces rarely agree on why this decline is happening or what the consequences would be. Some predict a utopian future where AI powered test systems make human oversight obsolete. Others warn that removing QA will collapse reliability and increase liability exposure.
Once you lay these arguments side by side, a pattern appears. The optimistic articles tend to focus heavily on tooling. The pessimistic ones tend to focus on people and outcomes. They are not debating the same problem. One side is asking what machines can do. The other is asking what humans lose when empathy and end user advocacy disappear from the delivery process.
Pulling the threads together
When you compare these viewpoints, a few truths become hard to ignore.
Automation is powerful but limited. Tools can test paths. They cannot challenge assumptions. They have no concept of human frustration, trust, or cognitive load.
Developer owned testing works in theory. But developers have competing priorities and are incentivized around delivery speed, not risk reduction. Without a balancing force, quality becomes subjective and often optional.
AI improves efficiency but not accountability. AI can accelerate coverage, but it does not decide what should be validated, nor does it negotiate conflicting requirements between the business and the user.
Every industry that removed its independent quality function eventually reinstated it. Manufacturing, aerospace, healthcare, financial services... the pattern is clear. When quality, as a blanket statement, becomes everyone’s job, it usually becomes no one’s job.
What's the Real?
Ok, let's pause the conceptual and philosophical while we dig into what's actually going on around us.
Some technology companies are reducing or even eliminating dedicated QA departments, shifting more responsibility to developers and automation. For example, Indeed let go of nearly all dedicated QA engineers and shifted testing responsibilities directly onto developers, leading to a noticeable decline in release quality and reliability. Developers themselves admitted that their approach to testing could not match the depth or focus delivered by specialized QA analysts.
There are some organizations that see this shift as a logical extension of cost-saving measures and faster delivery needs. Developers are expected to run the same tests, possibly with automation help, and product teams adopt a DevTestOps approach. However, when QA roles are cut, production bugs and customer impact rise, and team morale suffers as developers balance more tasks than before. And somehow the LinkedIn app is suddenly re-installed on their phones.
On the other side, market analysts forecast a continued or even increased need for skilled QA and QC professionals because software systems are growing more complex. Security risks are expanding and AI-driven automation opens more opportunities for QA experts to deliver strategic, exploratory, and boundary-pushing work. Recent research argues that the unique judgment and advocacy of QA professionals cannot be replaced by automation alone.
Those supporting the decline in QA emphasize advances in automated testing and the cost benefits of faster releases. They point out that product ownership for quality across all teams could elevate results and reduce bottlenecks. Yet, practical results from early adopters reveal that cutting dedicated QA roles without a solid transition plan results in measurable drops in product quality and customer trust. Teams report greater stress and missed opportunities for improvement when nobody is advocating for the end user in the development process.
By comparison, articles from QA thought leaders and analysts stress that automation should complement, not replace, human QA. There are limits to what scripts and tools can catch. QA experts bring creativity, empathy, and holistic thinking to the table, especially when it comes to understanding business needs or designing scenarios that test real user experience. Yep, automation moves faster, but only humans can catch the quirks and edge cases that make or break software for real people.
What software organizations would look like without a QA department
From an executive perspective, removing a QA department is a bet on three things:
Process Maturity
Developer Ownership
Tooling.
Here is how that bet typically plays out in practice:
Short term gains, fragile long term stability. Initially, eliminating a QA department can reduce headcount and speed up delivery cycles. Teams may ship more features faster because fewer handoffs exist. However, absent a disciplined quality function, defects often become more expensive. The cost shifts from controlled testing to reactive firefighting, customer support spikes, and brand damage control. Senior leaders quickly learn that those early savings can evaporate into much higher incident and remediation costs.
Accountability blurs. Without a QA unit, quality activities are distributed. That works if product teams are mature, have strong engineering practices, and accept measurable ownership for quality. In organizations where maturity is uneven, lack of a central quality voice means fewer end-user advocates. The company risks shipping features that meet spec but fail in real world use.
Risk and compliance exposure grows. For regulated industries, security and privacy checks, traceable test evidence, and formal sign offs are not optional. A dedicated quality function often carries institutional knowledge and process discipline for compliance. Removing that layer without strong replacements increases legal and financial risk.
Customer perception suffers. QA analysts frequently act as end-user advocates. They think about edge cases, accessibility, performance under load, and real workflows that product specs might not capture. Without that viewpoint, products can be functionally complete yet frustrating. That impacts churn, negative reviews, and renewal rates.
In short, you trade organizational clarity and risk management for short term speed unless you replace QA with equivalent governance, tooling, and culture. The outcome depends heavily on leadership intent and execution.
If you want my opinion on this
If you are an executive considering removing your QA department, ask what you will replace it with. Successful alternatives require deliberate changes: codified accountability, measurable quality metrics, investment in automation platforms, and explicit ownership of user advocacy. Without those, the short term gains of a smaller headcount will likely be offset by higher customer support costs, slower time to recover from incidents, and damage to brand trust.
Friendly reminder, Quality is not a checklist. It is a set of practices, roles, and cultural expectations that protect customer value. Technology will keep changing the tools QA uses and the skills required. Still, the human element of advocating for the user, thinking in scenarios, and making trade offs remains essential. The future of QA is not absence. It is reinvention anchored by measurement and accountability. That is a position that I will continue to champion.
I didn't make this stuff up. I try to look at it from every angle. Here's some reference material to draw your own conclusion.
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