What is design QA? Definition for design-engineering handoff

Design QA is the pass where designers check what engineering built against what design specified — catching the gaps between the Figma and the shipped pixels.

The gap is almost always real. Spacing drifts by a few pixels, the wrong shade of grey gets used, a state in the design system gets implemented with a custom variant. Each individual miss is small; the accumulated drift across releases is what turns a tidy product into a sloppy one.

The pass that works

The designer walks the staging build with the design open on the other monitor. Wherever the implementation drifts from the design, they capture the broken state, name what was expected, and add it to a list. The list becomes a single artifact engineering can work through.

Visual feedback collapses the time cost. A capture session with dictated notes — "this card should have 16px padding, not 12px" — produces a markdown document an engineer or AI coding agent can act on without the back-and-forth that "the design doesn't match" usually creates.