What questions should I ask as a new QA in the Team/Organization?

I have been thinking about writing a blog on QA strategy and process, since lately I have been writing tutorial blogs for test automation stuff. This has been in my list for long however due to time constraints I was not able to write about it.

As per my experience I have realized that there are multiple questions that come on the top of our mind when we join a new QA team or a new organization. I have created a list of all questions that may help QAs to easily onboard on the new team and get all the insights about the areas like QA process, development process, test automation, testing types, automated pipelines, tools, frameworks used, etc.

Below are some of the questions that I feel are important and needs to be asked when you join a new organization or a new software development team to get better insights about the development, QA and deployment processes .

1. How many products do we have?
2. How many platforms does the product support? For e.g. Web, Mobile, etc.
3. Which tool is used for version control?
4. Which tool is used for running the Agile board? E.g. JIRA, Azure DevOps, etc.
5. What is the tech stack used for Web applications?
6. What is the tech stack used for Mobile applications?
7. What is the tech stack used for APIs?
8. Which test automation tool/framework is used for testing Web applications?
9. Which test automation tool/framework is used for testing Mobile applications?
10. Which test automation tool/framework is used for testing the APIs?
11. Which tool is used for Performance testing?
12. Do we perform API/Web/ Mobile Security testing?
13. Which tool is used for API Security testing?
14. Which tool is used for Mobile Security testing?
15. Which tool is used for Web Security testing?
16. Where do I find the test cases and scenarios for Manual testing? Link to the Drive or access to Test case management tool is required.
17. Does the testers use any specific website for test data generation?
18. What is the current QA process? How does the QA start and finish testing?
19. When does the scrum call happen?
20. When does the Story Grooming call happen?
21. UI/UX tool for mobile and web applications — Mock screens?
22. Where do we have the CI/CD Pipelines setup? Azure DevOps, Jenkins, etc.?
23. What all test are covered by Devs/QAs in automation? Unit/Integration/Contract/ End to end tests, etc.
24. Does the Dev’s write the Snapshot tests?
25. What is the Code Coverage %?
26. How is the build generated and deployed for Web and Mobile applications?
27. Does the automated tests run on CI/CD Pipelines?
28. Who does the UAT Testing?
29. Do we have a pipeline for generating UAT build and performing regression tests on it?
30. How does Production deployment happen? Who does it?
31. Who does the Production release? Is there a separate team?
32. Is Sanity testing done in Production?
33. Is the Production deployment Manual or Automated?
34. Do we run the Security Checks in Automation Pipeline? For e.g. tools like Checkmarx, BlackDuck, etc?
35. Is there a separate pipeline for running performance tests?
36. How do we plan release?
37. How frequently is the Web/Mobile/API release done?
38. Do we have a hotfix pipeline? How do we release hotfixes?
39. How are the production bugs handled? SLA for fixing them?

The questions doesn’t just end here. There might be more questions coming to your mind when you get an answers for the above questions. Try to ask as much information as required to be comfortable on your job.

The best way to get answer to these questions is to setup a call with the Team Leads and update the answers in to these questions in a document so its easy to revisit.

Conclusion

We should seek as much information from the Team leads or the concerned persons in the team so it helps us in performing our daily activities as a QA smoothly.

This also helps in getting a good hold about the current status of the application that is in development and the applications that are already in production. It will also help in devising a good QA strategy for testing.

A good QA should be pro-active, responsible and accountable for his actions. It is good to be vocal and provide recommendations as per your experience.

Happy Testing!