Well I have been in the QA group over 2 years now. (rev: 09/2019)
I am still limiting my testing to Fedora Workstation Live because that is what I am familiar with as a user / maintainer (for a small group of users). I am quite familiar with the hardware, so I always do the testing on bare metal. I have dedicated a hardware PC for testing (Lenovo M83). It is a i5-4570 CPU 3.8Ghz 8Gb machine with a 500Gb disk. This is a recent upgrade. My test machine doubles as the spare and a user machine had a power supply failure which was not worth fixing. So my test machine got allocated to the user and I got a "new" test machine. It's a few years old, but it actually has AVX2 which although it is a newish feature is still sort of rare because the manufacturer is still only making that available in their more expensive CPU chip sets and most folks don't buy the top end price wise.
When I test a drop, after checking the ISO's checksum, I use media writer to put the image on a thumb drive and use the thumb drive to boot my test machine. This is also a recent change from DVDs. The thumb drives let the install run a little faster than the DVDs did. I always choose the (I want to make space available) and pick the (Delete All) followed by (Reclaim Space). I do this to avoid any possible issues with the last installation. After the installation is complete and the PC has been restarted, I set the display to a resolution that works with the monitor using the Settings application. Then I install Gnome-Tweaks and set the fonts to sizes that I am used to and I use the Gnome Settings to set a screen resolution that works for me. Then the testing begins; Besides the official test cases, I configure the machine for my as deployed configurations. That is delete and install applications as needed and change various settings and preferences as required. I then test the applications and check that the settings and preferences are as they should be. This is to see if the drop will work as expected for daily use.
If you'd like to comment or send some advice, please feel free to do so.