Wherever I worked so far as a software developer we had the QA department very close. In the same room or next door. They were there from the beginning until the end, tested our software continuously.

If we developed something, that was hard for them to test or to understand, they gave us a hard time. So we tried to make software testable. Do meaningful logging. Make things repeatable. Develop tools to export state/parts of the database, that can be restored. So you can actually test one feature and don't have to do 100 steps every time you need to test Feature X.

All that also greatly helped the developers, because a lot of companies develop software, that the developers can't even try out, because it only runs in a QA system they don't have access to. That's horrible.