50 QA Tester Jokes Every Tester Has Lived

A QA engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 999999999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a NULL. A real customer walks in and asks where the bathroom is. The bar bursts into flames.

Dev: it works on my machine. QA: great, we'll ship your machine.

The only thing more reliable than our Selenium suite is the assumption that it will be red on Monday.

Manager asked when we'd be done testing. I said done relative to what.

Bug reproduces 100 percent on my laptop. The moment I share my screen it works perfectly. The bug is shy.

Dev asked if I could give him simpler repro steps. The steps are: open the app.

We don't have time for testing this sprint. We have time for the four hotfixes that follow.

Our manual regression script is 412 steps and takes 6 hours. Step 1: log in. Step 412: question your career.

Approved by QA. Signed off Friday at 4:58 pm. Sev1 declared Saturday at 6:03 am. The cycle is sacred.

Staging is exactly like production, except for the data, the traffic, the third-party integrations, the feature flags, and the database version.

Dev: did you test on Firefox? Me, in 2026, slowly closing my eyes: yes.

Automation engineer mood: the UI changed by 2 pixels and 480 tests are now smoke.

The flaky test has been flaky since 2019. It has outlived two acquisitions, three CTOs, and the original framework.

PM: the e2e suite is red again. Me: it's been red for six weeks. PM: oh, so we can ignore it.

Mobile testing strategy: we have one Android device. It's a Pixel 4. The battery is swollen. Please do not drop it.

Accessibility bug filed in 2022. Status: triage. Priority: someday. Assignee: nobody.

I asked the team if anyone wanted to own quality. Everyone said yes. Nobody did anything.

The testing pyramid at most companies is a testing martini glass: a heavy top of brittle e2e, a thin stem of integration, and a footprint of unit tests that test the getter.

QA: I flagged this in pre-prod. Eng leadership: we'll accept the risk. Three days later, the war room: how did this happen.

Test data philosophy: every name is Test Test, every email is test@test.com, every credit card is 4242 4242 4242 4242. Production is shocked when users have apostrophes in their names.

Dev closed my bug as not reproducible. I reopened with a video. He closed it as cannot reproduce on my machine. I attached the video again. He closed it as wontfix.

Regression is a noun. Until you say I'll regression this real quick. Then it's a verb and a war crime.

QA gets promoted to PM when nobody else will take the role. It is the most aggressive lateral move in tech.

The dev wrote 600 lines of code. I wrote 6 test cases. The PR reviewer asked why my coverage was so low.

Severity 1: the app is down. Severity 2: the app is on fire. Severity 3: the QA noticed something. Severity 4: nobody will ever look at this.

Engineering manager asked for a quality metric. I gave him a number. Now the number is the goal and the bugs are still there.

The Selenium test failed because the page took 1.3 seconds to load instead of 1.2. The fix is sleep(5). I am not proud. I am tenured.

I wrote a test that catches the bug. The dev fixed the test.

Dev: it's a one-line change, no need for QA. Me, holding the changelog from the last one-line change: tell me about your weekend plans.

Exploratory testing is where I click around for an hour, find seven bugs, and management asks what I produced today.

Our test environment goes down every Tuesday at 2 pm. Nobody knows why. Nobody is allowed to ask. We schedule around it.

The product manager wrote acceptance criteria as: it should work. I wrote 14 test cases. He rejected them as out of scope.

Dev marked the ticket as done. I marked it as ready for testing. He marked it as done again. We did this for 45 minutes.

I cannot reproduce that, said the dev. Well I can, I said, on the call, sharing the screen. Must be a flake, said the dev, closing the ticket.

Test plan written. Reviewed. Signed off. Code shipped without any of the features in the test plan. Tests still passed. Nobody noticed for three weeks.

Our load test hit 100 virtual users and the database fell over. Production has 40,000 users. Leadership called the load test a success.

I asked for a second device to test on. Procurement said we already have one. The one is in another engineer's drawer. He left in 2022.

Dev: this bug only happens in production. Me: that is the only environment that matters. Dev: yes but I can't debug there.

The contract testing initiative lasted three weeks. The Postman collection lasted three years. We do not speak of why.

I have been QA for twelve years. I have caught thousands of bugs. The first thing every new manager asks is whether we really need QA.

Shift-left, they said. Now I'm in design reviews, sprint planning, architecture meetings, security reviews, and I still test everything at the end. The shift went left and so did the workload.

QA budget cut. Automation suite frozen. Manual coverage reduced. Quarterly review: customer complaints up 300 percent. Mystery.

The test environment has been down since sprint planning. The sprint ends Friday. The retrospective will be about velocity.

The QA sign-off Slack thread is six days old, has 47 replies, two architects, one VP, and zero answers to the question I asked on day one.

Dev: send me a screenshot. Me: here. Dev: that is the login page. Me: yes, the bug is that I cannot get past it. Dev: oh.

Bug opened in 2019. Priority: low. Status: open. Comments: 0. Assignee: a person who left in 2021. It will outlive the product.

The test data generation script has no owner, no documentation, and no replacement. It runs every night at 2am. Nobody knows why it runs at 2am. Nobody is going to ask.

GDPR-compliant test data, they said. I now have 4,000 users named John Doe, all born on January 1st, all living at 123 Main Street. The uniqueness constraint test is going great.

Ran the load test against staging. Staging went down. The design team went down with it. Turns out staging was also their production. Nobody wrote that down anywhere.

Dev: did you clear cache? Me: yes. Dev: incognito? Me: yes. Dev: different browser? Me: yes. Dev: weird. I'll close as cannot reproduce.

PM: this is a UX issue, not a bug. Me: the button does nothing when clicked. PM: right, so the user experience is that nothing happens. UX. Move it to the design backlog.