Great software rarely gets the attention it deserves, getting out of the way and working reliably, it leaves headlines about embarrassing and, sometimes, costly, to the failures of lesser products.
But great software is not an accident; it’s the result of careful and thoughtful quality assurance processes. In the latest of our TechTalks with TFN, we spoke to Imtiaz Shaik, a QA specialist who has more than 14 years’ experience testing critical systems in manufacturing, banking, and healthcare.
He discusses what it’s like to manage QA in fields where failures can have serious regulatory consequences, the importance of considering the human element, and the leadership role that QA should play.
Watch full video below:
Quality forged under pressure
Shaik started his career in development, working on an electronic trading platform. His first insights into the importance of QA came when the product he had been working on reached users.
The initial feedback was not positive. “What we got from the customer was that several issues in our coding had been overlooked,” he recalled. “That experience basically opened my eyes to how quality is so critical and the importance of seeing it from the user’s perspective.”
Continuing to work in the financial sector underlined the lesson. “The banking industry follows a zero tolerance policy,” Shaik explained. “Any missed issue in production can create financial and compliance risks.” The experience changed how Shaik thought about risk, and how testing affected that. Rather than testing individual features, he began to take a more holistic approach, considering the end-to-end risks.
The importance of that approach was reinforced as his career took him into manufacturing and, then, healthcare at Cigna, where he said, “regulation was non-negotiable because the personal health information of the members touches every system.” It meant he had to adapt QA to move beyond functional validation.
What he found, across the industries, was that quality failures were rarely purely down to the code. Instead, they were created at the intersections of the code with users, data, and regulation.
Blending human judgement with automation
QA has not been immune to the increase in automation and, inevitably, has seen the introduction of AI to its work. However, Shaik is clear that human involvement remains critical.
“Manual testing keeps me connected,” he said, “it allows me to analyse the actual workflow and find ambiguity.” While automated QA can do a lot, a human is needed to understand human behaviour and, through that, the edge cases that can arise when a system is in use.
Shaik points to work he did for ADP Canada as an example. Developing a product that served both Canadian and US markets, it needed to address the very different payroll, tax, and employment jurisdictions in the two nations as well as the different permutations of employer and employee it would manage. Testing this required a hybrid approach, using automated testing for the functional elements, and human testing on elements that relied on judgement. The approach paid dividends, said Shaik, “By implementing these two testing strategies, I prevented payroll discrepancies, reduced client escalation, and released on time.”
QA as leadership and shared responsibility
Shaik has also moved QA from being something considered at the end of a process, to something that is considered every day in Agile environments. “QA should be involved at every step,” he said. Including QA in sprint planning and daily stand-ups helps define the acceptance criteria and surface risk early. Instead of directing changes at the end of a process, QA provides leadership through clarity during development.
It also helps provide direction for teams. “Sometimes the priorities are different across teams,” he explained, but QA can help bridge these differences, “this approach realigns the team to share goals.”
“My leadership philosophy is simple,” Shaik said. “Build clarity, empower technical teams, and create a culture where quality is everyone’s responsibility.” By creating teams that understand business rules and regulatory impact, QA encourages critical thinking that prevents the need for last-minute QA solutions.
Testing towards what comes next
Shaik sees QA continuing to change with AI and automation. “I see QA roles evolving in upcoming years, from the traditional testing into quality strategic and AI-augmented engineers,” he said.
That shift requires new skills — from understanding AI-generated outputs to integrating AI into CI/CD pipelines — but it also reinforces older ones: systems thinking, communication, and an instinct for risk. QA, for Shaik, will be less about finding defects late, and instead about shaping quality early.
With software now a part of almost every electronic device we use, the cost of failure increases. To address that, proactive QA that anticipates risks, and crosses teams to reduce or remove those risks becomes essential, and helps ensure ambition does not overwhelm reliability.
Like great software, great QA rarely gets attention because, by definition, it does not attract notice. But that is what has kept Shaik attracted to the field for more than a decade. “I am very passionate about the QA because every stage of my career showed me how critical the quality is,” Shaik said. “QA is not just finding issues in products. It’s understanding the whole ecosystem.”
