How is your average week looking, what is your primary focus?

Discussions
,
1

In 2025 we saw a lot of debate around testing, QA’ing, quality engineering, automating and now QA AI engineering. For me at least it’s really hard to tell what people are actually doing and what their main goal is.

I do not want to get into that debate about differences but felt it may be useful if people shared a quick view of their role and what a real week looks like, not a hypothetical one, a real one.

Despite some back and forth between viewing myself as QE because I do pretty much all of the activities listed under all those titles I’d probably still regard myself primarily as a software tester because I do more of the activities that I feel best suited to testing.

My role leans heavily towards testing as a learning, discovery, exploration and investigative activity around product risks and opportunities. Whilst it is a holistic view, I’ll test requirements and business value goals alongside end user data analytics, for the most part I test the product itself using test sessions. Usually focused on risks, say accessibility or maybe a risk at the api layer or more general feature level risks.

There is no average week but here’s a rough view.

60% on my primary activity of session based testing - I’m lead solo tester on 8 products.

20% on automation, tools and CI activities.

10% on more general quality activities, planning, process, continuous improvement

10% study and learning

*0% on test case creation or manual script execution

For example I suspect those in a QE category have a very different breakdown and that’s what I’m interested in and whilst I want to increase my primary activity they may have a different primary they want to shift more to.

When I’m looking at leveraging AI in my mind I want to increase that 60%, that seems a very different goal to a lot of the articles and tool reviews I am seeing.

This is not about judging as others will clearly find different models valuable in their context but it may be useful to share to help understand why some of the discussions can have very different stances.

2 Likes
2

I spend around 50% of my time either learning. The other 50% is investigating customer cases and regression tests for cases, and fixing tests that I broke in that process.

50% Learnings : New programming techniques and tools, Python and C++17 , how the product works, how the hardware we build works, and finding new features in the product that nobody bothered to document, so yeah around 50% of my week is discoveries, many of which just go onto the backlog.

50% Regression Testing: Writing new test cases and tooling, and refactoring it to keep the various tools all talking and consistent and tidy. I’m in the don’t fix it if it’s not broken yet stage for software building, rapid expansion.

Sadly 0% spent on process improvements: We did not have a weekly software team meeting. But we have one now, so I’m going to use that as a win:-) It took long enough for that to start happening again.

3 Likes
3

No average week here either, but similar to yours in that I’m the lead tester for a few products (currently 2 active products and a couple that are starting to be worked on):slight_smile:

Session based testing, especially release testing with the PO: 20%
Automation, tooling: 20%
Investigating issues and supporting others in investigating: 40%
Planning, documentation, general quality activities: 20%
Studying/Learning: 0%*

We don’t typically have learning as part of our job in a focused sense, but I tend to learn here and there as needed for the project, or as part of training that happens sporadically throughout the year.

I feel like I need to get some of the planning section higher, but that can be difficult when fighting fires.

1 Like
4

I usually spend 2-3 hours communicating with different people, like lead, pm, TPM, etc., to understand the feature, product, etc.

I create test cases sometimes manually, or sometimes using the AI of the BrowserStack test management tool. Tbh, I create test cases manually faster than AI, but now it is part of KRA, so willingly or unwillingly, I have to create test cases using AI. Then another major task is the execution of test cases that depends how it will be tested, either by reviewing pr, manually, or through an automation script. Apart from that, I also spend some time playing chess with other colleagues, and if there is one thing that I try to learn on the floor, it is test case design. I keep watching others’ test cases, like how, what, and why they are writing particular test cases for particular scenarios.

I have also recently started advocating quality in my team and also with PMs.

5

Thanks for those that replied, its good to the slightly varied focuses and some common ground we have even in a small group.

I’d like to see a few more, in certain areas when I see posts on some topics I still find myself thinking that I have no idea what activities they are doing, I used to be able to guess to some extent but these days I’m not even sure I can do that, the common ground though gives a bit of hope that we are at least in the same field.