Claude and Obsidian - How a QA Professional Uses These Tools on a Daily Basis
In this article, I discuss how I use Obsidian alongside Claude as a QA engineer to better organize my work, and which plugins, skills, and templates are involved.
Being a QA in this AI era has been quite challenging. As delivery speed increases, a big question comes up: how can I make sure I haven't forgotten anything? Am I really covering the scenarios that need to be covered? Good organization is essential in every area of life, and QA is no different. That's why Obsidian has become a very present tool in my day-to-day, and I'm here to tell you how I use it.
Why Obsidian?
Basically, Obsidian is a note-taking and knowledge management app that works with Markdown (.md) files stored locally on your computer, with the option of keeping them in the cloud through the paid version or a community plugin.
Several factors made me switch to this tool. Before, I used Notion, which, although a good tool, was so visually customizable that I ended up spending more time building templates than actually adding content to them.
The fact that Obsidian is much "cleaner" and focused on notes means fewer things pull me away from my focus. Another factor is that my notes are stored locally. In a work environment, data security is essential, so knowing my notes are safe gives me more peace of mind compared to other tools. Obsidian also lets you add external plugins that help with productivity without cluttering the screen, which is a big differentiator for me.
And last, but most importantly: since I've been using AI a lot for certain tasks, producing content in Markdown already makes integrating with it easier. Basically, my Obsidian has become my second brain.
Usage and AI integration
Before getting into how everything fits together, I first need to give a brief context on the resources I've been using, which are:
- Templates
- Skills
- Obsidian Plugins
Templates
The first thing I did when I started using Obsidian was create templates for the documents I usually need.
Templates are notes you create with a specific structure, and whenever you create a new note, you can reuse that template.
As a QA, for now I have the following templates:
- Technical tasks template: a template file used as a reference whenever I need to generate test plans for technical tasks (database migrations, consumer creation, APIs).
- Business tasks template: follows the same logic as the technical tasks template, but I use it at an earlier stage, when I'm in product discovery together with the Product Owner, to define which testing layers can be added to that new feature, its risks and mitigations, and how to measure the success of the new feature.
- Meeting notes template: this template holds the main details about a meeting, and I use it to take notes or to create agendas for meetings I'll be leading.
Skills
We know that skills are a great resource for cutting down the time spent on repetitive tasks and for keeping a consistent standard while using AI. In my context, I created a few skills, which are:
- Test plan creation: whenever I call this skill passing a Jira task ID, it fetches the context of that task, then looks for reference content in Confluence (which I specified in my
CLAUDE.md), and after this contextualization, it creates a test plan .md file using the templates I created earlier.
- Finding tasks without test plans: a simple skill integrated with the Atlassian MCP that searches for all my tasks carrying a specific flag for test plan creation, and adds them to a .md file that I use with the Kanban plugin, to keep track of what I need to do and what I've already done.
- Publishing Zephyr test cases: an integration skill that takes the planned tests and publishes them to Zephyr, which is the tool I use for test management.
Plugins
I've already mentioned one plugin I use, Kanban, for task management, but recently I saw the need for two new plugins:
- A plugin that integrates directly with Claude Code, without having to leave Obsidian
- A plugin to have easy access to my skills.
Since I couldn't find them in the store, I decided to create both.
The first is a plugin that opens the terminal inside the vault (folder) I'm working in, making it easy to use Claude Code within Obsidian itself:
The second was a simple plugin to display and run my skills, where I can see all available skills and run them directly from Obsidian:
How everything fits together
Now that we know everything I use in terms of Templates, Skills and Plugins, I'll give an example of how this works in real life.
Suppose there's a task AB-123, which is an epic or product discovery coming from the product team. The flow for its test plan would be:
For technical tasks, the process would be similar:
Final notes
I confess it has been fun to venture into ways of organizing myself for better performance using AI tools. There is still the challenge of reviewing the content it generates. For that, I always try to collect feedback from the team on the generated tests and the test data provided, checking whether it's clear or whether something wasn't covered.
I use the same logic for the Templates. I'm always updating my templates based on the reviews I do, always adding a bit more context or removing context that doesn't make sense for what I need.
As for plugins, I've been experimenting with a few from the community, and I also had a lot of fun building a new one. They're not in a final version yet, nor in the community store, but if you want to try them, the repository has a step-by-step guide on how to use them locally. The links are at the end of this article.
Anyway, I hope this article inspires you to integrate more things into your Obsidian or even to rethink your views on it.
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