Developer vs QA: Regression Bug Ping-Pong

From “It worked” to “Nothing works as expected”

👋 Hello, this is Valentina with the free edition of the Optivem Journal. I help Engineering Leaders & Senior Software Developers apply TDD in Legacy Code.

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You just finished a User Story.
Tested it locally. It worked.
You pushed it. Felt good.

And then…
QA comes back with a long list of regression bugs.

Again.

Your first reaction?

“How is this even related to what I changed?”

Your second reaction?

“Did QA even test this properly?”

And your third (the quiet one)?

“Am I actually bad at my job?”

You implemented exactly what the story asked for.
You didn’t refactor half the system.
You didn’t touch those areas.

“But it worked on my machine.”

You change one thing…
and accidentally affect five others.

Not because you’re reckless —
but because the system doesn’t tell you what behavior you’re about to break.

Manual QA discovers these issues after the fact.

The problem is that expected behavior lives only in people’s heads.
Or worse:

• In outdated tickets

• In vague acceptance criteria

• In tribal knowledge

• In “that one person who knows the system”

Nothing is executable.
Nothing runs automatically.
Nothing protects you before QA gets involved.

So regression bugs slip in — silently.

What Acceptance Tests change

Acceptance Tests move expectations out of conversations and into code.

They answer questions like:

• “What must never break?”

• “What behaviors define ‘working’?”

• “What does the business actually rely on?”

And they answer them before QA ever sees the build.

When you have Acceptance Tests in your pipeline:

• You catch regression bugs immediately

• QA spends less time reporting obvious breakages

• Developers stop being surprised

• Confidence comes back

Legacy Code is where bugs thrive

You expect things to break.
You’re afraid to touch anything.
Every change feels risky.

If you’ve ever thought:

• “QA is blocking us”

• “Regression bugs keep killing our velocity”

• “Every release feels risky”

• “We test, but it’s never enough”

That’s exactly where Acceptance Tests help most.

Want to see how this works in practice?

👉 Join me for a 2-hour live training on Acceptance Testing

I’ll walk you through:

• How to stop regression bugs before QA finds them

• How to write maintainable, behavior-driven acceptance tests

• How to do this safely — even in legacy code

• How to reduce friction between devs and QA

No theory-heavy fluff.
No “rewrite everything”.
Just a practical roadmap you can apply immediately.

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