Traits of Amazing Quality Assurance Engineers
You’re on your phone trying to figure out your order for takeout and the sushi menu won’t open on mobile browsers.
You’re trying to sign your child up for dance classes, but the page isn’t accepting the password that you *just* created. Not to mention, you just signed in… so why do you have to sign in again!?
Jira changed their UI and you have no idea how to find project administration page; there’s no longer a link directly to it.
Who prevents us from experiencing these terrible situations? A high performing Quality Assurance Engineer! We are looking to build our QA team at SalesLoft, and that raises the question, what makes a great QA Engineer?
To start, it’s not about formal QA education. Looking at the people on our SalesLoft QA team — the degrees are varied. Business, electrical engineering, MIS, CIS, psychology, biomedical engineering, political science, economics, mass communications. What about those people made them a good fit for QA?
Passion for Quality
You have an overwhelming passion for quality, in all areas, in all parts of your life. Can’t handle spelling errors? Wish people could be consistent with their comma usage? Can’t help but point out a flaw in a movie? Want to make sure the dishwasher is properly loaded?
I’ve found a very high correlation in those who love spreadsheets and those who love QA. It’s the strict organization of data. Formatting. Lookup tables. Conquering a formula. You should derive satisfaction from things being correct, regardless of the subject matter. Life is full of gray areas, but most of them are not found in QA.
No fear
You are continuously having to learn new skills & tools. It may be unfamiliar or hard, but it can’t prevent testing. You must embrace the unknown and find the gaps or holes or unexpected results. Our engineering team is constantly building on the next new technology. Here are some of the challenges our QA Engineers have overcome: we’re testing microservice architectures with sophisticated tools. Our testers deploy to Kubernetes pods via a home-built Slackbot. They log into pods where they execute code and read logs to diagnose what might have just happened. We get our hands dirty in the Rails console to make sure data is saving to the right place. A successful QA Engineer at SalesLoft doesn’t need to know it on day one, but they will certainly be excited to learn.
Communication & Influence
It’s your job to tell someone they did it wrong. A certain amount of tact is required. It is a delicate balance to influence your peer in understanding they’ve made a mistake while maintaining a positive working relationship. If you’re lucky, your company has built a culture around quality. You need to tell people it’s broken and advocate for a fix. You need to be able to shift your team’s perspective to make sure they understand that we all own the quality that we deliver.
Detective Work
It’s almost like the software version of House.. something is wrong, but how did that happen? You explore to find all the edge cases; strange data configuration, losing internet in the middle of saving a record, how many characters does that field actually handle? The customer has a bug, but how to do you reproduce this error? Developers will send back a bug if there aren’t clear ways to reproduce it. It’s up to the QA Engineer to discover what happened, and then write very a clear bug report — including expected results, actual results, steps to reproduce and associated screenshots, videos, and log files.
Perseverance
When things are getting tough, and you’ve tested the same things on 5 different browsers, or you’re on your third iteration of QA, you maintain a tireless approach to finding that last bug. You know there can never be a compromise of quality — you push through to the end to deliver the best possible product. You are driven by knowing that the customer is depending on you to produce bug-free software.
Customers First
Using our core value Put Customers First as inspiration, you’re able to advocate for bugs that you find knowing that the user experience is what matters the most. It takes 5 clicks to get to what you want? You bring that up as an issue. The developer is focused on making it work, but a good QA Engineer needs to make sure it works for the person using it.
Join us
Day in and day out, these traits describe someone who has the relentless pursuit of quality. Sound like your dream job? We’re hiring!
