What is expected out of QA engineer — present and future?

This question keeps coming to back to me from various engineers. The answer is very simple — `constantly moving up the value chain`

Now, the next question is how do I do that ?

Once an engineer identifies self as Test engineer(designation), he tends to work only around boundaries of testing. His thinking and actions are all revolving around testing and nothing else. This limited identity ceases the thought process and thereby new possibilities are limited. Once this becomes a routine, engineer reaches a comfort seat & then it is going to become even more harder to move out of comfort zone and move up in the value chain.

So, what should I do ?

Expand your identity. Identify self with Product you are testing which is bigger than the Test engineer’s identity. Once we do it, the thinking & actions would revolve around the product and thought-process shifts to bigger possibilities

Once this happens below questions are natural consequence

• Hey! what is the architecture of my product and can I test it better by understanding it thoroughly?
• Is my product scalable, what are the bottlenecks and risks & how can I help identify them ?
• I am finding defects, is there a way we can prevent them from occurring ?
• Hey!! looks like time is getting wasted here, how can I prevent it by suggesting process improvements ?
• What are the problems my customers are facing and how can I help to improve customer’s experience ?

Once engineer starts thinking in this direction, naturally he is moving up the value chain. The sense of ownership moves from testing to the entire product. This is what is needed for next generation engineers.

While it is important to identify with product and increase your area of influence, it is equally important to have awareness of new technologies, and how they are being used to solve business problems and most importantly how people are testing it out.

At TestVagrant we constantly push ourselves and challenge each other to expand our boundaries to constantly move up the value chain. We test B2B and B2C products built on Microservices, cloud, kubernetes, containerization, artificial intelligence and more.

Post success of Optimus we are building AI arm to it to simplify a) authoring tests b) execution in no time & c) Insights for quick takeaways.

If this sounds your type of work and you love to solve testing problems with technical skills, then TestVagrant is the place you can rock !!