How to Build QA Culture in Your Company - Filip Barszcz

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"The truth is that we are feedback givers for all the development teams." - Filip Barszcz

In this episode, I talk with Filip Barszcz about what most companies get wrong when they claim to have a quality culture. Filip reveals why stakeholders, developers, and product owners all speak different languages when they say "quality" and how he translates between them to build actual buy-in for testing strategy. He walks through his playbook for introducing change without burning out the team: small wins first, honesty about short-term productivity drops, and color-coded tables that make executives eager to invest in QA. If you've ever struggled to get testing taken seriously beyond "just click through it before release," this conversation gives you the roadmap.

Filip Barszcz is a full-time QA Chapter Leader with over 10 years of experience in the IT industry. Throughout his career, he has collaborated with renowned organisations such as SCIB (Santander Corporate & Investment Banking), T-Mobile, Capital.Com, and IQVIA. He specialises in building and refining quality assurance processes, mentoring QA professionals, and fostering close collaboration between QA and development teams. As a strategic QA leader, he has driven major organisational transformations — from building QA departments from the ground up to restructuring teams for greater efficiency and alignment with business goals. He has successfully defined test strategy, designed automation architecture, and implemented multi-level testing — from unit to end-to-end coverage.

Highlights:

• QA professionals are feedback givers for all development teams, not just testers, and that broader role is what makes quality improvement possible across an entire organization.
• Introducing too many changes at once creates team fatigue and resistance; one significant change per quarter, fully measured before the next begins, keeps adoption stable.
• Framing quality failures as financial cost, by calculating what a late-stage defect costs to fix, is the argument that moves business stakeholders from skepticism to willingness to invest.
• Consulting everyone affected by a change before rolling it out, and letting them shape parts of it, turns potential resisters into partial owners who advocate for the new approach.
• Visibility of QA work, through regular reports and status updates that use tables and clear metrics, closes the gap between what testers do and what management and stakeholders actually see.