This is a question I've asked myself and my friends a couple of times. Because crossbows and early firearms have a lot of similarities regarding use in medieval times (being able to pierce armour, long range, slow reload times, etc.) why did this not lead to later era tactics, only using crossbows and not early firearms? Or did this happen in some instances, and am I missing something?
I discuss it a bit here and here
The short version is that, yes, tactics resembling those associated with pike-and-shot armies were being used in Europe by at least the 12th century. Combined arms armies consisting of cavalry, spear-armed infantry, and crossbowmen proved quite successful on a number of occasions. The benefits of a balanced force like this should be obvious.
But there are also a great many other factors which kept it from being quite the same. The armies were smaller and less organized, because the states raising them were themselves weaker and less organized. Because of a lack of drill and coordination, the infantry were probably not as effective on the attack as the pikemen of the 16th-17th centuries and more suited to holding defensive positions. The crossbow is simply no replacement for a gun; even the heaviest crossbows, which were only developed in the late middle ages, lack the penetrative abilities of the musket, to say nothing of the moral shock that massed gunfire provides.
Tonio Andrade, in his book The Gunpowder Age, makes the argument that the Chinese were the first to implement volley fire with firearms and this tradition evolved from one initially pioneered with crossbows.
He mentions that the first evidence of volley fire goes back to the Warring States period of China (475 - 221 BCE) and developed with subsequent Chinese dynasties. One example laid out is that of a manual produced by the martial artist, Cheng Chongdou which envisions crossbowmen being divided into three teams of hundred and that they follow the procedure below:
The first hundred of them have already loaded their arrows and are already arrayed together in the front. They are labeled "shooting crossbows" [he is referencing a diagram of the procedure accompanying the text]. The next hundred crosssbowmen have also already loaded their arrows, but they are arrayed together in the next row and are labeled "advancing crossbows." Finally, the last hundred men are arrayed behind them, in [the third and] last row. They are loading their crossbows...The first hundred men...shoot. After they are done they retire to the rear, at which the second hundred men...move to the fore and themselves become "shooting crossbows." The rear hundred men...move forward and become the "advancing crossbows"...And in this way they revolve and take turns firing a constant stream, and the crossbows sound without cease."
Cheng Chongdou notes the antiquity of this technique as he prefaces his description of the above process by mentioning how, "the ancients used ten thousand crossbows shooting in concert to win victories over enemies." Professor Andrade also quotes examples from the earlier Tang and Song dynasties which also envision groups of crossbowmen performing a countermarch, where the front ranks would fire and retreat to reload while being replaced by fresh crossbowmen from the back.
It should also be noted that in the Chinese case, there were no troops such as pikemen to protect the crossbowmen. They were expected to "plant their legs like mountains" and put out a concentrated stream of arrows to stymie any advance against them.
In short, the Chinese did develop firearms style tactics with crossbows (though it should be mentioned that Ming military thinkers like Qi Jiguang probably adapted pre-existing crossbow volley tactics for firearms).
Do you mean like standing in ranks and firing en masse? Could you be more specific?