Test quality

Our tests catch the vast majority of issues before production.

What is test quality?

Test quality refers to how effectively your testing processes catch issues before they reach production environments. High-quality tests reliably identify bugs, regressions, and other problems during development, preventing them from affecting end users.

When test quality is high, development teams operate with greater confidence, spend less time firefighting production issues, and can focus more on delivering new features. When it's low, teams suffer from increased production incidents, developer frustration, and erosion of user trust.

How test quality impacts developer experience and productivity

Why do developers care about test quality?

Developers care deeply about test quality because it directly impacts their daily work experience. When tests reliably catch issues early, developers can:

• Make changes confidently, knowing that regressions will be detected
• Spend less time debugging production issues and more time building new features
• Receive faster feedback on their code changes
• Reduce context switching caused by unexpected production firefighting
• Feel more confident during deployments and releases

As one engineering leader noted:

"Our organization employs 300 engineers, but we operate without a dedicated quality assurance team or release management team. Instead, our developers take full responsibility for testing and do an exceptional job with it. Despite this approach, we maintain 99.99% availability and receive very few production bug reports from customers."

Director of Engineering at Software Development Company

How does poor test quality affect team morale?

Poor test quality creates a cycle of distrust and frustration. When tests fail to catch issues before production, developers lose confidence in the testing process and may even start to view tests as a burden rather than a tool. This leads to:

• Increased stress during deployments
• More time spent on unplanned work fixing production issues
• Reduced confidence in making changes to existing code
• Slower delivery cycles as manual testing increases
• General frustration and reduced job satisfaction

An engineering leader observed this common pattern:

"Consistently across all teams, developers report that the testing system is inadequate because they're constantly encountering problems with the tests themselves."

Head of Platform Engineering at Autonomous Vehicle Tech Company

How does test quality affect delivery speed?

Contrary to the myth that quality testing slows development, high-quality tests actually enable faster delivery over time. By catching issues early and providing rapid feedback, good tests:

• Reduce the number of production rollbacks
• Minimize the need for extended manual testing cycles
• Lower the cognitive burden on developers, who can focus on smaller parts of the system
• Enable more frequent and reliable releases
• Reduce the "fear factor" associated with making changes

An engineering leader described how improving test automation directly enhanced their delivery capabilities:

"We've experienced a dramatic increase in automated test coverage simply because teams can no longer postpone it indefinitely. People have learned through direct experience that they can't proceed effectively without proper testing. When faced with the choice of either performing repetitive manual testing or investing in automation, they increasingly choose automation."

CTO at Online Trading and Investment Platform

Why test quality is important?

Test quality is crucial for successful dev teams because it serves as the foundation for continuous delivery, developer confidence, and product stability. Teams with high-quality tests:

1. Reduce production incidents: By catching bugs before they reach users
2. Improve developer productivity: By providing rapid feedback on code changes
3. Build team confidence: By establishing trust in the reliability of the codebase
4. Enable faster innovation: By reducing the risk associated with changes
5. Enhance user satisfaction: By delivering more stable and reliable products

The difference between perceived and actual test quality can also reveal organizational disconnects.

"It's fairly obvious - without needing advanced data analysis - that when a quality assurance team rates themselves as having 100% test coverage while everyone else in the organization rates it at 40%, 27%, or 33%, there's likely a significant disconnect in understanding between these teams that needs to be addressed."

Global Employee Experience Manager at Software Development Company

How to measure test quality?

Using the DevEx survey question

The Network Perspective DevEx Survey uses a simple yet powerful statement to assess test quality:

"Our tests catch the vast majority of issues before production."

This question measures developer perception of test effectiveness—a critical leading indicator of test quality. Low scores indicate that developers don't trust the testing process, while high scores suggest confidence in the test suite's ability to catch issues.

"Looking at our testing metrics, we're specifically measuring test quality in terms of how effectively our tests identify issues before they reach production environments."

HR Partner at Retail Company

Quantitative metrics

While the survey provides valuable perception data, it should be supplemented with quantitative metrics:

1. Defect escape rate: Percentage of bugs found in production vs. during testing
2. Test coverage: Percentage of code covered by automated tests
3. Mean time to detection: How quickly issues are identified after deployment
4. Flaky test rate: Percentage of tests that produce inconsistent results
5. Test suite execution time: How long it takes to run the full test suite

One engineering team leader emphasized the importance of measuring test coverage:

"We implemented several coverage metrics, starting with basic code coverage. We also track how well our code addresses the specified requirements, and how thoroughly those implementations are tested. Our minimum standard is that each requirement must have at least one dedicated test case."

Delivery Manager at Software Development Company

Common test quality challenges

How do we address the problem of flaky tests?

Flaky tests—those that produce inconsistent results when run on the same code—are one of the biggest challenges to test quality. They erode developer trust in the testing process and create uncertainty during releases.

To address them:

1. Establish a zero-tolerance policy for flaky tests
2. Prioritize fixing flaky tests over adding new features
3. Isolate test environments to prevent cross-test interference
4. Review test design practices to avoid timing issues, shared state, and external dependencies

How to handle complex testing scenarios

Different product types present unique testing challenges, as noted by an engineering leader:

"Testing challenges vary significantly between different types of products. At one company, the main difficulties stem from their highly complex frontend which is tightly coupled with the backend. This architecture makes it nearly impossible to test components in isolation, requiring extensive integration tests that are resource-intensive and slow. In contrast, at another project, the software components are properly decoupled, but we face significant challenges with hardware-software integration and numerous issues with the physical testing platforms."

Head of Platform Engineering at Autonomous Vehicle Tech Company

To handle complex testing scenarios:

1. Develop domain-specific testing frameworks and tools
2. Invest in test environment management and stability
3. Use service virtualization for hard-to-replicate dependencies
4. Implement comprehensive integration test strategies
5. Adopt domain-specific testing techniques (visual regression testing for UIs, simulation testing for hardware, etc.)

How to improve test quality

Who should own testing in the organization?

A growing trend is making developers directly responsible for testing quality. The experience shows this can be highly effective:

"We actively work to prevent the traditional adversarial relationship where developers build something and then 'throw it over the wall' to a separate testing team. In that model, the QA team performs their quality checks and then tosses any issues back to developers, creating friction and delays. Instead, our approach is to equip developers with appropriate tools and expect them to take ownership of testing their own work."

Director of Engineering at Software Development Company

Similarly, another leader saw improvements when they made this shift:

"Our current approach represents a significant organizational change. We've eliminated the separate quality assurance role entirely and made engineers directly responsible for quality. Ensuring that their code works properly is now an integral part of their job responsibilities. This approach has noticeably shortened our development cycles. Even without formal metrics at the time of implementation, we immediately observed reduced cycle times because we eliminated the handoffs and back-and-forth task transfers between separate teams."

CTO at Online Booking Platform

What tools and frameworks improve test quality?

While the specific tools will vary by technology stack, several approaches have proven effective:

1. Standardized testing libraries and frameworks
2. Automated test generation and property-based testing
3. Monitoring and observability tools
4. Chaos engineering practices
5. AI-assisted test generation and maintenance

One organization improved quality by providing standardized tools:

"In addition to the quality supporter training programs I mentioned, we also provide specialized libraries and tools that guide developers toward best practices. This means developers don't have to figure out complex implementations on their own. Instead, they have access to libraries that provide these capabilities out of the box. We implemented this approach after discovering that developers were creating problematic solutions because they lacked standardized tools for these common tasks."

CTO at Online Trading and Investment Platform

How do we build a culture that values test quality?

Improving test quality requires not just technical changes but cultural ones:

1. Celebrate test improvements as much as new features
2. Include testing objectives in performance reviews
3. Allocate dedicated time for test improvement and maintenance
4. Share test quality metrics publicly and track improvements
5. Train all developers on testing best practices

One organization implemented "quality supporter" training programs to build this culture, while others integrate quality considerations into their regular development processes.

Benefits of high test quality

When organizations successfully improve test quality, they see numerous benefits:

1. Reduced production incidents: Fewer customer-impacting issues
2. Faster release cycles: More confidence to deploy frequently
3. Improved developer satisfaction: Less time spent on unplanned work
4. Better code maintainability: Tests serve as documentation and safety nets
5. More innovation: Teams can experiment with less fear of breaking things

The experience that demonstrates these benefits:

"Another advantage of our approach is that when a bug does slip through our CI process, we typically identify it very quickly because we're intensive users of our own product. This significantly improves our overall reliability, as we can catch issues early before they propagate further through the deployment pipeline."

Director of Engineering at Cloud Observability Platform

Conclusion

Test quality serves as a leading indicator of overall engineering health. Teams that score highly on the statement "Our tests catch the vast majority of issues before production" typically demonstrate greater productivity, higher morale, and better business outcomes.

The Network Perspective DevEx Survey provides a simple yet powerful way to assess this critical aspect of your development process, allowing you to identify gaps in your testing strategy, benchmark against industry standards, track improvements over time, and prioritize specific test quality initiatives,

By regularly measuring and improving test quality, engineering leaders can build more resilient systems, more confident teams, and ultimately, better products.