Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) is an IT professional who can work equally and effectively in both development and testing roles. Whereas the Quality Assurance (QA) is an IT professional determine requirements in making or developing certain products in order to have good quality.
What’s The Specific Difference Between SDET and QA?
A Professional SDET are performing a type of QA, but not professional QA not all performing SDET. QA is divided into two types, namely QA Manual and QA Automation. A professional QA Manual does an application testing manually and does not use code for automation testing but a professional QA Automation does an application testing using code to run automation testing. There is only one type of SDET whose task includes all QA tasks and SDET are usually identical for testing applications using code for automation testing.
Maybe there are many companies that give this profession the name SDET, but many companies also give their position name QA Automation. In those situations, SDETs are capable of reviewing the code itself, writing unit tests, and approaching the test coverage with a programmer’s mindset. But QA Automation can write code that can test the app or website behavior. But unlike this definition of SDET, they usually aren’t at the level of knowing how the software itself is built.
SDETs work with developers to understand the code itself. QA Automation sometimes don’t become involved until after the development is done (although all testers collaborated with developers in some form or another).
Conclusion and Recommendation
So, the difference between SDET and QA is that SDET is only one type whose main function is to help ensure that broken functionality is caught immediately while QA is divided into two types, namely Manual QA and Automation QA. A Manual QA professional performs application testing manually and does not use code for automation testing but Automation QA professional performs application testing using code to run automation tests.
And recommendation in the best of both worlds, SDETs and other types of testers can work together — providing enduring quality across the website or app.
