What are the top 3 quality assurance skills for a QA engineer?

If you think a decent QA analyst should just be technically savant and able to find actual or potential bugs in the workflow of the given product, you’re a bit wrong. A proficient QA analyst needs more than technical aptness and knowledge of methodologies and programming. Soft skills are also a must for a true professional. Our top 3 include critical thinking, social skills, and flexibility How do these skills help in testing? Let’s analyze it together. Critical thinking helps to evaluate each situation from as many sides as possible, consider the customers’ perspective and amend the product so that it fits as many customer categories as possible. Social skills entail productivity of working collaboration and efficient communication. Without them, it’s much harder to cooperate with different teams involved in product creation, whereas such cooperation should be each tester’s daily routine (since it’s the most direct and effective way of learning about product details). Flexibility is one more key social skill for each QA pundit. Different projects require various tools and techniques, and a QA specialist should jump from one to another seamlessly and quickly.

What are the QA engineers’ responsibilities?

Below are the key work objectives and responsibilities of a QA engineer. Let’s describe them in detail! Analysis and review of system specifications. QA specialists run multiple tests making sure that new products satisfy all project requirements. The list of obligatory tests can include probing the system limits and functionality in the desired environment (e.g., via a real-time simulator). Identification of the functional bugs. QA professionals perform multiple tests and bug fixes. What is more, they run extra final tests before the product release. Sending bug reports to the production team. QA testers have to track their findings, send bug reports with all the essential information about the found issues, and perform steps for their resolution. Cross-functional collaboration with QA engineers helping easier changes implementation. As a QA tester, one should incessantly cowork with cross-functional teams to guarantee quality at each stage of development. Evaluating risks and identifying/resolving dangerous issues ends only after the final product release.

What is the QA role in Agile?

Agile software development practices have been developed to establish a collaborative and efficient approach fostering speed, collaboration, and functionality. Agile-based startups have quicker development cycles and turnaround times — primarily thanks to faster and more productive communication between different teams. Nevertheless, higher production speed often impairs the final product quality — and that’s precisely the place for a QA team to come in. QA becomes an integral part of development — bringing validation and ensuring the stability of the product. Within the Agile development, testing, and production teams work together daily, they are well informed about each other’s workload and possibilities. Hence they can coordinate their efforts more effectively. The client’s brief becomes a primary manual for collective work — and instant feedback (collected and expressed via Jira or some other teamwork app) enhances its quality. What are the basic pros of Agile-based development? Relevance, stability, quickness, and orientation on the result.

Is manual QA a poor use of time?

Any LinkedIn community, online forum, or comment section under the topical article will surely give you some posts/comments foretelling the doom of manual QA testing and strongly advising you to come to the bright automated side. However, although manual QA can be a bottleneck, that’s only a part of the story. Every all-encompassing testing strategy should include a manual component if the end product is designed for human users. When it comes to exploratory or interface testing, we still beat the machines in the long run. No QA program can predict the whole scale of UX situations — ergo, no QA program can eliminate all the potential bugs. Usability problems can kill the new app's popularity entirely — and who else can check out all the usability issues except humans? What’s more, for all the critics who point out the slowness of manual QA as its primary drawback, it’s useful to remember that manual software testing services allow crowdsourcing QA and significantly improve the timing.

Does manual testing have a future?

It surely has — but which strategies will prove the most winning and beneficial in the future? Here’s a concise list. 1. Concentrate on exploratory testing. Easier systems with predictable feedback and minimal randomness degree allow pre-planned tests. However, predicting the outcomes with AI or blockchain is difficult — just as considering all the unexpected variants. Diversifying data tests and evaluating the decisions against specific metrics will give more useful data. 2. Rely on previous experience. Testing products developed on top of new frameworks still allows relying on older data, tests, and results — e.g., to compare them with the new ones. 3. Never give up learning. New technologies and frameworks are overwhelming, but you should at least understand the basic principles of their functionality and implementation so that you can test systems more efficiently.

Mykola Petrov, Author at Lemon.io

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