What is a QA?
To sum it up in a couple of lines, QA (Quality Assurance) refers to the way quality is measured, not only of the product but also of the development process.
Many companies drop QA to cut costs; perhaps they see it as unnecessary or a waste of time, but in the long run the difference shows. No application can be perfect: it will always have defects. A QA's mission is not just to find them, but also to help prevent them.
Tester vs. QA
Many people confuse the terms or lump them together, but they are two different profiles:
- Tester
- Responsible for detecting and reporting failures in a system during the development phase.
- QA
- Responsible for ensuring the quality not only of the product, but of every development process.
A QA does a tester's tasks, but a tester does not do a QA's tasks. In other words, a QA is an evolved tester.
What a QA does
Analysis
Helps the Product Owner define tasks and acceptance criteria. A QA usually has a broader view of the product and of development, so they can help define user stories and make them clear for developers.
Building a test plan
Based on the acceptance criteria, they create a test plan with different test cases, taking into account the application's different flows.
Testing strategies
Depending on the state of the project, the timelines, the size of the application and other factors, they define the testing strategy to use.
Reporting
I don't know if every QA does this, but I send weekly reports so the PO knows the state of the platform: open and fixed bugs.
Automated scripts
That is a topic for another post, but QAs can be manual testers or automation engineers. The latter write scripts that run tasks automatically, which requires knowing how to program.
To conclude: a QA brings quality to the product, the development and the process. It is not a waste of money, because the end customer receives a product that is ready to use. Many projects without QA deliver untested products that end up failing in production, spending money fixing failures and losing time at launch.
Originally published on the Underc0de forum.