Breaking Down Silos: Aligning QA, Dev, and DevOps to Build Better APIs

Software release cycles are accelerating. In fact, 85% of organizations now release at least once per month, with a 51% increase in automated testing spend last year alone. Yet API quality still breaks down. Why?

APIs sit at the center of this acceleration, but as velocity increases, many organizations face a persistent challenge:

How do we ensure API quality when teams remain fragmented?

In our recent webinar on aligning API quality efforts across teams, SmartBear experts explored how QA, Development, and DevOps can work together to foster a culture of shared quality and deliver better APIs, faster. This article shares key insights and practical takeaways from that discussion.

Why API Quality Breaks Down

Despite growing investment in testing and automation, many organizations still face common pitfalls that undermine API quality. The stakes are rising fast. With trillions being invested in digital transformation and AI accelerating development cycles, the organizations that achieve cross-team alignment will pull ahead of those still fighting fragmentation.

When QA, Development, and DevOps teams are not aligned, testing becomes reactive, bugs slip through, and delivery slows. In short, API quality breaks down at the seams.

Common pitfalls include:

• Ownership confusion: In agile environments, developers may write some tests and QA others, but full coverage is rarely clear. In QA-led organizations, testers often lack visibility into what is being built or how it is evolving.
• Tooling fragmentation: Testing tools are frequently scattered across teams or disconnected from DevOps workflows. Without a unified view, automation coverage and quality metrics are hard to manage consistently.
• Process gaps: Testing is not always integrated early in the API lifecycle. Without collaboration during API design and development, bugs are found later when they are more costly and disruptive.

Here’s a short clip on these common pitfalls and their impact from our webinar:

Building a Culture of Shared Quality

Improving API quality requires more than tools. It demands a cultural shift across the organization. Successful teams align around three key pillars:

• Shared language: QA, Dev, and Ops must develop a common vocabulary around quality. This includes how tests are structured, what coverage looks like, and how success is measured.
• Early collaboration: Embedding QA early in API design and development helps teams catch issues before they reach production. When QA and developers work together from the start, testing becomes an enabler of velocity, not a bottleneck.
• Collective accountability: Quality cannot live in one department. Moving from a QA-owned model to a culture of shared responsibility is key. QA leaders can act as orchestrators of strategy, but all roles must contribute to quality outcomes.

Learn more about building this culture in the following clip:

Practical Strategies to Drive Alignment

How can organizations put shared quality into practice? In our webinar, we covered several actionable strategies, including:

• Integrate testing into CI/CD pipelines: Embedding API tests in automated pipelines provides continuous feedback and supports rapid releases without compromising quality.
• Leverage service virtualization: By decoupling testing from backend readiness, teams can test earlier and expand coverage, even when dependencies are incomplete.
• Share test results across teams: Unified dashboards and visibility help all roles stay aligned on the current state of API quality and quickly address issues.
• Define clear expectations: Establishing clear expectations for test feedback enables developers and QA to stay in sync and avoid miscommunication.
• Enable test design reuse: Reusable test components accelerate test development and help maintain consistency across teams.

For more details and practical patterns, watch this short clip:

Conclusion

API quality does not live in silos.

Whether your teams follow a QA-led model, agile delivery, or a DevOps-driven approach, achieving high-quality APIs at scale requires alignment across roles and a culture of shared responsibility.

See these strategies in action: The full webinar features a case study showing how one engineering team implemented QA in sprint refinement sessions, shifted testing left through early automation, and dramatically reduced the time between bug discovery and resolution using ReadyAPI.

👉 Watch the full webinar on demand: Breaking Down Silos: Aligning QA, Dev, and DevOps for API Quality

About the author

Steven Pepa, Product Marketing Manager at SmartBear Software