When I made an initial version of this post on my LinkedIn, it got a lot of attention including comments from some of the companies who make my favorite work tools. I asked folks if they’d like to see an expanded blog post with more of my thoughts on the tools I use, so this is that post.
As we go into 2025, here (in no particular order) is my QA tool stack:
Cypress
Cypress has been my go-to tool for test automation on web projects for several years now. It has a simple, expressive API but also contains some very powerful features for when you want to get deeper, and above all, it allows me to get things done quickly. I haven’t taken a deep look at Playwright, so things may change in the future, but for now I’m very satisfied with Cypress and plan to continue using it in 2025.
GitHub
Github is obviously where my team and I store our test code, but also make use of its powerful Github Actions pipeline features to run our tests on a schedule, or kick off runs against targeted environments. We also love the code review tooling and collaborate on code frequently.
VS Code
VS Code is my preferred IDE and I recommend it to my team. Additionally, we use Prettier to enforce consistent, clean code style across our projects.
Qase
Qase is a lightweight but powerful test management tool with fairly decent reporting capabilities. In addition to test run reports, I love their dashboard features which allow me to check on automation progress and other key metrics at a glance. Our team was previously using TestRail, but we made the switch and haven’t looked back.
Shortcut
If you aren’t using Shortcut, seriously take a look at it, it’s great. Our engineering team manages all our work in this Trello/Jira competitor. As QA, we also use it for tracking our tasks like automation work, regression testing, and other chores.
Notion
Notion serves as a knowledge base and documentation hub for our whole company, and as QA we use it to document our practices and store some test data references. In particular, I love the ability to reference pages in other pages, creating a web of knowledge across all our documents – and with the native integration of Mermaid.js, creating flowcharts is fun and easy.
What tools do you use to get your QA work done? Let me know in the comments if you’re using the same tools and techniques as my team, or if you have other tools you love to use!