Quality Assurance Engineer Career Path

Introduction

Quality assurance is one of the essential phases of the software industry. The idea behind adopting this process is the requirement of flawlessly tested software or the application by clients, worldwide. All the organizations want to develop well tested and a good quality software product before being deployed to the customers. Thus, it is the primary concern for the developers to carry out all the tests and assurance checks by eliminating all the errors and defects of the product, before offering it to the customer. As quality assurance is the crucial step in software development, the organizations are always looking for the Quality Assurance Engineer, Analyst, Tester and thus there are plenty of job opportunities for the candidates who are looking for a career in this field.

If you live for details, enjoy working methodically to solve problems, and have a knack for understanding software user behaviours, a job as a (QA) Quality Assurance Engineer may be just the tech career path for you to explore. Now, if you are thinking of a career as a QA engineer, that simple answer is probably not enough to satisfy your detail-oriented mind. So, here is a more detailed explanation that this article will provide and help you gain the insights related to the profile.

The topics that will be discussed include:

What is quality assurance in software development?The difference between quality assurance and testingVarious quality characteristics of the quality assurance processWhy is quality assurance vital in the software development process?How can you become a qa engineer?

Well, are you ready? To begin with, let us first know regarding:

What Is Quality Assurance In Software Development?

Quality Assurance in Software Testing is defined as a procedure to ensure the quality of software products or services provided to the customers by an organization. Quality assurance focuses on improving the software development process and making it efficient and effective as per the quality standards defined for software products. Quality Assurance is popularly known as QA Testing.

The Quality Assurance process can involve –

Recognizing standards when any applied in software development methods.To carry traditional processes, for example, quality reviews.Conduct in-process test data recording processes.Now that you have an understanding about quality assurance, let's look at what's the difference between QA against Testing.The Difference Between Quality Assurance And Testing

Briefly, Software Testing helps find and fix already existing mistakes and Quality Assurance helps avoid them. Both of these processes are important and if you want to meet the best quality criteria, you cannot have one without the other. But a separate QA department in IT is quite rare, that's why sometimes it's better to outsource one than build an in-house team.

QA is about making sure that the design meets stakeholders' expectations, while testing is mainly detecting the bugs or bigger failures. Testing focuses on system control and error detection, with product orientation and corrective actions. Testing is about checking the behavior of the application, while quality assurance is about making the overall quality level of the project better each day.

Some may worry about the risks involved in extending the team: every additional tester added in a product development team makes the development cycle more expensive and less competitive than other products that offer the same function. On the other hand, it is impossible to find a person who would be familiar with all stages of product development at such a high stage that they will be able to competently assess its effectiveness from the start. However, if we look at the product development cycle, it's obvious that the team with testers that are starting working on a project from the beginning is gaining crucial expertise over time. Therefore, in most cases, Testers can perform Quality Assurance duties, because they are familiar with every aspect of the product and specific conditions such as business logic behind it. This situation is also fairly reasonable because being aware of the problems that emerge in the product development process, it is also easier for team members to pinpoint their main roots in the process of their manufacture.