What is Quality Assurance and Quality Control?
When a product is being built, stakeholders have expectations and requirements. It is important that there is a process put in place to ensure that those high quality standards are being adhered to and mistakes in the product development are spotted and reported.
Quality Assurance focuses more on proactive processes while Quality Control focuses more on reactive corrections that need to be made.
Quality control also focuses on inspection and testing whereas Quality Assurance involves documentation, audits, and management.
Core skills needed for becoming a good QA engineer
Attention to detail
The role of a QA engineer involves being detail-oriented and thorough in order to spot issues or discrepancies in quality standards set for the product.
Good communication
QA engineers will be communicating with stakeholders, management, and developers for the product. Effective and clear communication between all parties involved is really important for the development process of a product.
Good time management
Since a QA engineer will have to balance multiple tasks throughout the day, it is important to have strong time management skills to ensure that you stay productive and are able to meet your deadlines.
Problem solving skills
Throughout the life cycle of a product, issues will arise. It is important that QA engineers have strong problem solving skills and are able to develop a plan to solve those issues.
Strong listening skills
A good QA engineer not only needs to be able to communicate but also listen to their development team, management, and stakeholders to ensure the successful launch of the product.
The ability to write a test plan
A test plan is a document detailing the objectives and testing processes that will be applied to the software product. QA engineers will work with other developers and stakeholders to develop this testing strategy.
An understanding of test automation tools and manual testing practices
It is helpful for QA engineers to be familiar with different automated testing tools like Selenium. They will also need to know how to effectively manually test products in order to identify bugs.
Strong understanding of the Software Development Life Cycle
A good QA engineer should understand the full life cycle of software products in order to effectively plan and test them.
Here are the 7 phases of the Software Development Life Cycle:
- Planning Stage
- Analysis Stage
- Design Stage
- Software Development Stage
- Software Testing Stage
- Implementation and Integration
- Operations and Maintenance Stage
Comments
Post a Comment