The Hardest Lesson I Learned as a Quality Engineering Leader

When I stepped into my first true leadership role in Quality Engineering, I thought my main challenge would be building automation coverage fast enough to keep pace with engineering. Like most QA leaders, I measured success by test counts, coverage percentages, and green dashboards.

But I was wrong.

The real villain wasn’t “bad testers” or “lazy developers.”
It was something more insidious: the maintenance monster.

The endless churn of fragile tests, flaky pipelines, and dashboards nobody trusted was quietly undermining everything.

On paper, we had automation. In reality, we had a liability.

The Pain of Fragile Automation

When teams get stuck in maintenance mode, the pain multiplies fast:

• Time sink: Weeks lost chasing false failures instead of finding real bugs.
• Slow pipelines: Test suites that took hours and blocked releases.
• Eroded trust: Developers stopped believing the results (“Oh, that test always fails, ignore it”).
• Leadership trapped in fire drills: Instead of coaching and scaling, leaders are firefighting broken scripts and flaky environments.

Worse, the maintenance monster doesn’t just kill velocity; it kills culture. When people stop trusting automation, they stop using it. And when engineers see QA as a bottleneck instead of an enabler, Quality loses its seat at the table.

The Hard Truth: Coverage Isn’t Confidence

Early in my career, I equated more test scripts with more confidence. I celebrated when our coverage percentage went up, when our regression suite grew to thousands of tests.

But here’s the truth I wish I learned sooner: a flaky script is worse than no script at all.

• No script means a gap you can fill.
• A flaky script means wasted hours, brittle pipelines, and mistrust.

This was the hardest lesson for me to accept as a QE leader: you don’t win by having more. You win by having better.

Where I Went Wrong

At one point, I looked at our regression suite and realized most of our failures weren’t bugs in the product, they were bugs in the tests.

We had “false red” after “false red.” And every time we thought we were done, another brittle locator or data dependency broke.

Instead of creating leverage, we created debt.

And debt doesn’t just slow you down, it compounds.

The Turning Point

The turning point came when I shifted my mindset:

• From coverage at all costs → to confidence through maintainability
• From test counts → to quality signals developers trusted
• From QA-owned → to shared quality responsibility across engineering

We stopped asking “How many tests can we automate this sprint?” and started asking:
“Which automation gives us the highest return on confidence?”

That shift unlocked everything.

Beating the Maintenance Monster

So how do you beat the maintenance monster? Here are the three levers that changed the game for my team:

1. Focus on Maintainable Patterns, Not Test Counts

Every test should be built on patterns that are:

• Easy to extend
• Hard to break
• Consistent across the suite

This meant building shared page objects, centralizing login flows, using data factories instead of hardcoded test data, and ruthlessly deleting brittle tests.

We automated less, but we trusted more.

2. Introduce AI-Assisted Triage

One of the quiet superpowers of modern QA is using AI for test triage.

Instead of engineers manually combing through thousands of logs, we used lightweight AI to:

• Flag likely false failures
• Cluster similar issues
• Surface real regressions faster

This turned the daily maintenance grind into a manageable signal-to-noise problem.

3. Make Quality a Shared Responsibility

The biggest cultural win came when we stopped treating QA as “the owners of quality.”

• Developers owned writing meaningful unit and API tests.
• QA engineers focused on higher-level flows and exploratory testing.
• Product owners helped define acceptance criteria tied directly to test coverage.

Once developers trusted the suite, they started fixing tests themselves. That was the moment I knew we had escaped the fire drill loop.

The Undiscussed Pain Few Leaders Admit

Here’s what most leaders won’t say out loud:

Chasing “100% automation coverage” often makes things worse, not better.

It’s a false summit.
You climb, you celebrate, you take a picture of your green dashboard, and then the mountain reveals itself again.

Because the real goal isn’t 100% coverage.
It’s sustainable confidence.

Confidence that when your pipeline is green, you can release.
Confidence that when it’s red, you can trust the failure.
Confidence that your team isn’t dreading maintenance Monday after Monday.

What This Means for QA Leaders

If you’re a QA or QE leader, here’s my advice:

• Delete before you add. If a test is flaky twice, kill it or rebuild it.
• Invest in architecture. Page objects, fixtures, data strategies, your foundation is your velocity.
• Use AI intelligently. Not as a gimmick, but as a force multiplier for triage, generation, and even self-healing.
• Coach your team on confidence > coverage. Make this the mantra.
• Push quality upstream. Developers, PMs, and designers all share responsibility for quality signals.

These are the levers that scale, not test counts.

Personal Reflection

The hardest lesson I learned as a QE leader wasn’t about pushing harder or hiring faster.

It was about pulling back.
Slowing down.
Fixing the foundation first.

It was about teaching my team that confidence is the real metric that matters.

Coverage can look good in a slide deck.
Confidence keeps the business moving.

That shift; from coverage to confidence; was the single most important leadership transformation of my career.

If you’re feeling the weight of the maintenance monster right now, don’t panic. You’re not alone. Every QE leader I know has wrestled with it.

But here’s the opportunity:
The monster isn’t unbeatable.

With the right patterns, the right culture, and the right mindset, you can turn your automation suite from a liability into an accelerator.

That’s how you stop fighting the wrong battles; and start leading your team to true quality.

👉 Want more posts like this? Subscribe and get the next one straight to your inbox.  Subscribe to the Blog or Follow me on LinkedIn