What Does a Beginner QA Need?

by Sergey Chernyshev, a QA engineer in Archy.

Lately, I’ve been noticing that more and more people are interested in starting a career in QA. What knowledge and skills do you need to be a QA engineer? And what is QA?

Let’s answer those questions. QA essentially means ensuring the quality of a product, ideally at all stages of the development.

The very first thing that a QA engineer will have to deal with in most cases is manual testing:

• manual testing of the functionality of an application;
• testing the layout of an app based on its design;
• bug description and its further implementation in the development.

In this case, a QA Engineer is a tester. Here the most important thing is being smart, able to understand the problem and ask the right questions: “What if it’s like this? Or like that”?

How and where should I start?

There is a popular belief that QA is the lowest step when entering the IT area. As we have already seen, an entry-level QA engineer is a tester. It is, in fact, true, because you can start a QA career with simple manual testing. Almost anyone can sit and tap the screen and see how the app crashes. This is the place where the first tester’s qualities are determined:

1. a new QA should be interested in his profession;
2. he should be diligent;
3. and be ready for monotonous work.

However, the quality assurance process does not end with functional testing, and the concept of QA is wider than testing alone. Here we step away from the trivial tests on functional requirements and move on to the analysis of requirements and documentation (the search for bottlenecks in the requirements and implementation), usability testing (the search for glitches in interfaces and functionality), performance testing and more.

Automated testing is a separate part:

• Building fully automated testing systems
• Writing automated tests for different parts of the application

An ordinary tester can become a developer who automates the tasks assigned to him by testers.

In addition, a good QA engineer is working on the development process itself. His goal is to ensure the quality of the product. If the faults in the working process afflict the product, they also need to be identified and fixed.

The QA process

I would say that a good QA engineer is a tester who has gone beyond testing in his work. Who works on the quality of the product not only in terms of “Requirements are met — ready for production”, but tries to make the product better in all aspects. Firstly for business, then for the user, and then for those who make this product. Therefore, I believe that it is better to begin the QA path with testing.

It will not be difficult to start with manual testing. The basic idea of manual testing is to simply use the application and try to crash it.

• It is necessary to compare the layout of the application with the design and find the differences.
• Before testing the design, it is a good idea to study Google guidelines for Android and Apple guidelines for iOS. After reading those it will be easier to distinguish a bug from a feature in the app’s design.
• Next, you will have to check the functionality of the application.

Here we generally look, tap, do whatever we want to crash the application.

After finding a huge number of bugs you have to pass them on to the developer. This should be done in the form of a bug card. GitHub, Jira, Clubhouse and other services are great for this purpose. How to work with them is a question of management.

Properly identified bug severity plays an important role in the development process. (I had an article about this before) It also helps to provide a link to a video that shows the bug or a screenshot, as well as to specify the model and OS version of the device that was used for testing. Do not forget that the text description of the bugs should be clear to every team member. Always describe the bug step by step and specify even the smallest details. These are the main points related to writing bug cards.

Another important aspect is English. If for some reason you do not understand English at all, it will be enough to learn English words used in manual testing of mobile devices. The easiest way is to change your phone’s language to English. If you are heading for the IT sphere, learning English is an excellent idea.

A good and understanding team will also help to have a good start. If you don’t have one, I recommend you to visit the QA channel in Slack. There you can ask any questions about testing.

All you need for a good start is:

1. Understanding the importance of your work and the desire to do it.
2. Fingers for manual testing.
3. The ability to work in services like GitHub, Jira, Clubhouse.
4. The ability to clearly express your thoughts and provide an accurate bug description.
5. Basic knowledge of English.

To sum up, I would like to say that starting in QA is easy. But if you want to grow in this field, you cannot shy away from server testing and writing automated tests. You will touch upon all areas of mobile development: backend, design, iOS client, Android client. You will need to know programming languages and design guidelines; understand how servers and databases work. A good QA is engaged in all areas of development and is familiar with all of them without, of course, going into too much detail.

If it was interesting to read about it, please clap, ask your questions in the comments and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Good luck and see you soon!