Nine Secrets of Excellence in Quality Assurance Revealed

A Quality assurance engineer is just a regular person with a dash of some extra qualities thrown in for good measure,” say the bug catchers of LumenSoft.

Develop a Fastidious Mindset

Being a fastidious person may not make you very popular but the trait comes in handy if your primary job is to find faults. Quality assurance requires you to look at every detail critically and question every answer, again and again. Over the long haul, you may develop the irritating habit of looking for bugs in every situation, but that’s the side effect of excelling in your chosen profession.

Be a Closet Developer

A good quality assurance engineer needs to have an adequate knowledge of how a code works and what algorithms are used. Previous software development experience is a huge plus because it provides you with a deeper understanding of the development process and gives you an appreciation of the developers’ point of view.

Moreover, a QA engineer should be able to develop test cases using any automation tool. These test cases are meant to automatically check the software from various angles. Though developers can also develop such cases about their program, but they will lack the outsider’s perspective and will tend to make mostly positive test cases. Besides, if a quality assurance engineer is just running the already developed test cases, s/he will be reduced being an execution button.

Begin with the Obvious

While you will have to go into the nitty gritty of every screen and test all scenarios no matter how remote their chances of occurring, begin with the basic flow. Test the basic commands like Enter, Save, Update, Delete, in as many different situations as you can think of. Because these are the command that the end users are most likely to use often. Besides, testing the basic commands in various scenarios can reveal many bugs; you can then move on to test the alternative and negative flow of the different screens.

Test Every Screen on Multiple Platforms

Test your software on multiple platforms like desktop, smartphones or tablet to see how compatible it is with each. And this goes without saying that an adequate knowledge of the platform where you are testing the software is a must.

Test Every Screen on all Possible Versions of your Software

If there are multiple versions of the software you are working on, you need to test every command on all versions. For example, software programs can have versions like personal and professional, and a particular command may work perfectly on one version but could generate errors on the others because of additional features added to that version.

Be a Product Wizard

There’s a good reason why quality assurance engineers need to have a detailed knowledge of the product they are testing. This will help you figure out how different screens are connected, how changes on one screen can impact others, and what features are common to different screens. Such knowledge is a pre-requisite for regression testing.

Be Your Customers’ Best Friend

Always try to work on the product by considering how the end consumer will interact with it. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes to have a feel of what might or might not be user-friendly. Develop empathy. This will also help you become a better person.

Develop your Communication Skills

To be able to understand developers’ point of view and customers’ perspective, you need to have good communication skills. Interact with them often and develop your oral and written communication skills. Such skills will help you in other fields of life as well.

Be More than a Bug Catcher

Be a stimulus for change by suggesting how things can be done differently. Study patterns of bugs and provide feedback to developers regarding recurring problems. This will help them reduce the rate at which the same kind of bugs are injected into the system.

Above all, enjoy your work. Not everyone can make a career out of fault finding mission and be handsomely rewarded for it!