Quality assurance (QA) is an activity aimed at improving processes and delivering quality products to customers. Sometimes, quality assurance is confused with quality control (QC) because both detect bugs. However, while QC refers to the final product while QA means to fix bugs during its creation, detecting any issues that might block the successful operation of the software or even affect the user experience in the final product. Quality assurance testing is one of the phases of the software development life cycle (SDLC), so the role of a software test engineer is no less important than a developer’s, even after the completion of the other development processes.
Any member of a testing team can be referred to as a tester or QA, but there are different testing activities, job titles, and hierarchies among testing team members, which also vary from one company to another. In this post, we will outline a generic team structure, and within it, each software tester's roles and responsibilities.
A good software testing team is a mix of specialists whose hard and soft skills are sufficient for a swift and successful testing of software under development. Many teams create a document that will regulate their personal and common tasks and responsibilities. This helps to stabilize the workflow of software test engineering. Usually, there are also separate documents for each team member that provide helpful information on task organization, schedule, recommended approach, deadlines, and all the details on quality standards and processes.
There are also specifications connected to expertise which can be defined from lowest to highest as a junior, middle and senior QA. You might also encounter job titles like a QA analyst, an automation engineer or developer, but in reality, they may all have similar responsibilities. Complicated titles are common within companies that have huge QA technical teams. They help to clarify the experience and competence of all specialists. However, the two essential QA roles are a manual testing engineer and an automated testing engineer. Let’s take a look at the responsibilities of a software tester engineer.
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As was stated above, a tester is a general term that can refer to any specialist in the field. A typical tester has relevant domain knowledge, valid knowledge of test designing concepts, and an understanding of execution methodologies. They should also be capable of efficiently communicating with the development team. Typical responsibilities of software test engineers include:
This type of tester relies on human observation skills to find bugs in a system which are sometimes hard to identify by automated tests alone. Typically, this is sufficient testing for a software product. A test plan regulates the workflow of manual testing engineers. Some of software testing engineer responsibilities include:
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An automated test is a script that allows a software QA engineer to run testing automatically. The responsibilities of an automation testing engineer are more complicated. They are sometimes named ‘developers in testing’ because they require sound programming skills to create automated test scripts. Automated testing aims to prevent time-wasting on routine testing activities and regression. So, what does a software test engineer do?
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A product should meet quality standards and goals in time. The planning, organization, and supervision of the teamwork fall into the test lead responsibilities. QA lead role can be held by an experienced manual or automated QA engineer and can be viewed as having an additional scope of responsibilities. Particularly, they perform the following tasks:
The relationship between the testing team and other teams in a software development company has evolved from Waterfall to Agile, and now to DevOps.
The Waterfall scheme separates the software testing team and locks it in its domain with specified roles and responsibilities. Testing is planned by them separately from developers. They have some interaction, but are mainly ‘staying in their lane.’
However, nowadays, proactivity is expected from a QA testing team since they share the development team’s aim to guarantee the quality of the software product. The Agile environment, where final product quality is a collective responsibility, is much more collaborative than Waterfall. Every team is almost equally involved, all can share ideas, developers are involved in testing, and all communication with the business analyst, client, product owner, and others. But Agile can be limited because of a lack of support and operation teams.
On the other hand, DevOps creates a continuous cycle with testing conducted at every phase of software development. Because of this, the role of a software engineer tester today is expanding to participate in complicated development processes. DevOps also has some outside roles which include analytics and support. This is beneficial as these people add value to the testing, and QA shares data with them that is useful for their jobs, as well.
These days, the role of a software tester is gaining more power both within a software project team and within a company. They are becoming full-stack software quality assurance engineers combining domain knowledge, testing experience, and technical skills with direct involvement in several developmental processes. The impact they provide results in higher levels of software product quality.