Building a QA Dashboard from Scratch

Building a QA Dashboard is one of those projects that looks straightforward at first, but quickly reveals its complexity as you dig deeper.

The Problem

Our team needed a centralized place to manage:

• Test runs and their results
• Test cases organized by feature area
• Release management and tracking
• Notification alerts for failures

Tech Stack

I went with Next.js for the frontend and Fastify for the backend API. Prisma handles database access, and PostgreSQL stores everything.

Architecture

Frontend (Next.js) → API (Fastify) → Database (PostgreSQL via Prisma)

Key Challenges

Performance

With thousands of test cases, pagination and query optimization became critical early on. I added proper indexes and implemented cursor-based pagination.

Real-time Updates

Test runs needed live status updates. I implemented WebSocket connections for this.

Lessons Learned

Building this taught me a lot about balancing feature richness with performance, and how important it is to design the data model correctly from the start.