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What is QA and why it's not only about testing?
The abbreviation QA stands for Quality Assurance. Translated as Quality Assurance.
To complete the picture of the QA engineer profession, you need to know:
- A QA engineer is a participant in quality management who is responsible for implementing the quality requirements of the project being created. The goal is to prevent errors in the future site or application at the creation stage;
- A QC engineer is a participant in quality management who monitors the fulfillment of quality requirements for a project being created. The goal is to find errors that exist on the created site, application or web platform. In fact, QC is a classic tester.
- quality management is a team that consists of quality planning (QP), quality assurance (QA), quality control (QC) and quality improvement (QI) specialists. Their task is to develop goals, policies in the field of project quality.
- testing or research – carrying out measures aimed at determining the compliance with the established quality indicators of the finished product.
What it is all about?
According to ISO, testing is the study of an already finished application, which is the task of a QC engineer. And QA testing is the introduction of requirements and conditions that must be followed during the development of a project in order to prevent bugs in the future. Visually, the relationship between QA and QC looks like this:
But if you look closely at:
- vacancies descriptions on job platforms
- articles and information on the Internet
then in practice the “QA / testing” ratio looks like this:
Why? Because the trend “QA = QC = testing” has been observed for 2-3 years. It’s easier and more profitable to find one QA engineer who will take on the full stack of “quality assurance”, project creation and provide cool conditions than to find several specialists.
Who is QA-engineer in 2023?
In simple words, a QA engineer is a specialist who tries to stop possible bugs when creating a project and looks for those that “sneaked” into an already finished project.
The duties of a QA engineer will help you understand more about the profession. Every working day, a quality assurance specialist:
- together with the customer, Product and Project managers determines the goals, requirements and indicators of the project;
- develops test scripts;
- analyzes the technical documentation of the project in order to identify possible difficulties in the project and prevent them from reaching the client;
- communicate with developers;
- conducts different types of testing;
- forms test cases – develops test documentation and ideas for fixing bugs;
- introduces problem areas of the project into the tracking system;
- analyzes tests and optimizes them;
- writes automated tests;
- conducts repeated tests that will show whether the errors are corrected or not.
The work of QA testers is varied. The mission is to help developers make a website, application or other IT project that will solve the pain of users.
Salaries and vacancies of testers in 2022
5 reasons why you should become a QA engineer:
If you want to become a QA tester, but don’t want to take a “blind step”, follow IT trends monthly on DOU, Djinni and other platforms.
- According to DOU, over the past year (from July 2021 to July 2022), the number of QA vacancies has doubled – from 501 to 1080, and on Djinni by 3.3 times – from 1019 to 3478.
- The number of Junior QA vacancies, according to DOU, has almost tripled from 38 to 129, and on Djinni to 209.
- Junior QA salaries continue to rise, with an average salary increase of $90 over the year.
- The number of “specialist for a QA vacancy” continues to fall – from 21.2 people per vacancy, the statistics fell threefold, to 7.5 people.
- and for 1-2 years of work, testers earn from $1,500/month.
What should a beginner tester know and be able to do?
To become a tester, it is not enough just to “think like a user” and have critical thinking. A novice QA specialist needs to know next things:
- types and levels of testing;
- how to work with Bug Tracking systems;
- on quality assurance characteristics;
- test artifacts and how to use them;
- how to automate testing;
- what metrics will help make testing even more productive.
Types of QA testers
According to the testing methodology, QA specialists are divided into:
- manual QA or “manual” testing – the tester manually checks the work of a part or a finished project for errors, bugs. “Manuals” are needed when automated testing is impractical (for example, it is more expensive or takes more time). This profession is ideal for beginners in the humanities.
- automation QA or testing based on special “scripts” – the tester writes special programs or queries to find errors or bugs. They are needed when “manual” testing takes longer or requires high accuracy. This profession is best chosen if you want to be closely associated with development.
- general QA is a “universal soldier”, a master in both manual and automated testing.
Ideally, the deeper the technical background (layout skills, working with different browsers) a beginner has, the better the results of his work will be and the faster you will climb the career ladder. If you are a humanist and want to become a quality assurance engineer, you will quickly succeed in “manual” testing.
