QA Fundamentals: Building a Career in Quality Assurance

Quality assurance, or simply QA, will have a very important role in helping you to successfully complete the application development lifecycle. This is because QA will bear the load of ensuring that the product meets your target requirements and also functions properly without throwing any defects. This layer will help you protect the quality of the final product and meet the expectations of your customers.

Want to build a career in QA? Great! Our article will help you develop the right understanding of quality assurance along with its roles and responsibilities and essential skills. We will also help you understand all the things that you must keep in mind to create a proper career along with the challenges of a QA tester.

Currently, the career of a QA tester has gained a lot of popularity across multiple industries like healthcare, finance, telecommunications, and core software development. This is because the demand for smooth digital experiences is rising every day which in turn has raised the market for a QA tester.

Table of Contents

What is Quality Assurance

Before we jump into everything related to a QA testing career, let us begin by sharpening our understanding of what is QA. It is the process of systematic activities to improve the quality of products or services. QA testing mostly covers various techniques, including manual and automation testing, performance testing, secure testing, and usability testing.

Let us now divert our attention towards some other of the objectives of including quality assurance in the application development and testing life cycle:

It works on the primary goal of defect prevention by identifying and resolving potential issues in the earlier phases of the development cycle before they have a massively negative impact on the core infrastructure of the application.

Quality assurance also helps implement continuous improvement to improve the quality of the testing processes and workflows, which will also have a role in elevating the efficiency of the entire process.

Finally, QA helps improve customer satisfaction by delivering high-quality products which meet your user expectations.

QA Vs. QC

In various scenarios, you can see that the new developers confuse quality assurance with quality control. Let us understand the major differences between both of these processes:

Quality assurance will focus on process improvement for identifying defects. It is a very proactive and process-oriented approach.

On the other hand, quality control will involve identifying and fixing defects in the finished product. This is a reactive process based on the testing reports and is also process-oriented.

In simple terms, QA aims to improve the processes while QC ensures the final product meets the quality standards set by your organization.

Roles And Responsibilities in QA

A QA tester will have to perform various actions and tasks depending on the role within a team. To further improve our understanding about the roles and responsibilities of a QA tester, let us understand some of the specific areas that you can serve in this industry:

● QA Analyst

QA analysts will be responsible for developing the test plans and also the test cases. He will also execute the tests to identify the defects within the framework of the application. Based on the test results, the analyst will document the findings and also collaborate with the developers in the team to resolve the issues.

● QA Engineer

The QA engineer will write the automation test scripts to automatically execute the test cases on the application. He will also execute the performance, security, and usability tests on the app framework. Based on the requirements of the application, a QA engineer will implement continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines for further streamlined testing scenarios.

● QA Manager

Finally, the QA manager will look after the functioning of the entire QA team and the execution processes. He will be responsible for establishing quality standards and also best practices related to QA. Finally, you will ensure compliance with various industrial regulations and guidelines to ensure the app is acceptable according to the modern standards.

Essential QA Skills

Want a career in the QA testing industry? You have to possess certain skills. These skills will include technical and soft skills. To further help you understand these, we have mentioned some of the major ones below:

The technical skills will include the knowledge of multiple programming languages like Python, Java, and JavaScript. You should also have experience with automation testing tools like Selenium and Appium. Apart from this, you must be proficient with multiple testing frameworks, API testing tools and CI/D tools.

You should also have proper analytical and problem-solving skills to analyze complex systems, identify potential risks, and also develop strategies to avoid these errors.

You must have proper attention to detail. This skill will ensure that you are not overlooking any defect while contributing to the overall reliability of the application.

Finally, it is very important for the QA professionals to have proper communication skills to collaborate with developers or project managers and stakeholders. Clear communication will also help you to ensure alignment on multiple quality objectives.

Education Background and Certifications

It is true a degree in computer science or any related field will be massively helpful in this field, but there are also various QA professionals who come from multiple disciplines. Not familiar with computer science? The following certifications will help you create a career in QA and improve your knowledge:

ISTBQ, better known as the International Software Testing Qualifications Board certification, is a globally recognized certification for software testers.

We also suggest acquiring the Certified Scrum Master certificate to demonstrate your understanding of multiple agile methodologies.

The Certified Software Quality Analyst certification will emphasize your software quality principles and practices while portraying your dominant knowledge in QA analysis.

Finally, you can also consider AWS-certified DevOps Engineer certification to highlight your skills in cloud testing along with continuous integration and continuous deployment pipeline knowledge.

Building A Career In QA

To build a career in quality assurance, you need to go through the following roles:

You will start as a quality assurance analyst or tester to improve your foundational knowledge and hands-on experience. This role will mainly consist of executing the test cases, documenting results, and collaborating with the development teams.

Based on your expertise and knowledge, you will proceed to roles such as a quality assurance engineer or automation engineer. Here, your responsibility will increase to designing the automated tests, improving the testing frameworks and also contributing to the overall product development process.

Finally, you will proceed with the senior leadership roles, including senior QA engineers, QA leads, and QA managers. Here, you will be responsible to oversee your team and also define the testing strategies. You will also be responsible for ensuring organizational compliance with quality standards. All these roles will contribute towards project management and strategic planning.

Tools And Technologies in QA

While implementing quality assurance testing, you will have to use multiple tools and technologies to improve the quality and efficiency of the process. Let us now divert our attention to some of the major tools and technologies that can assist you with the same:

To include automated keyword testing, you can use various automation testing frameworks like Selenium, Playwright, and Cypress.

You can add remote device testing with QA testing by using cloud platforms like LambdaTest. It is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform that lets you perform manual and automation testing at scale with over 3000+ browser and OS combinations and 5000+ real mobile devices. You can also use LambdaTest as a JSONPath Tester to implement XPath-based element selection. To use XPath with Selenium on LambdaTest, you can simply enter the relevant code snippet in the Selenium terminal window.

To implement performance testing during QA analysis, you can use tools like Jmeter and Load Runner. This inclusion will help you simulate various forms of user interactions like unusual traffic and unexpected behavior to understand how your application behaves according to these.

Want to track the critical bugs in the infrastructure of the app? Use well-known bug-tracking tools like Jira, Trello, and Bugzilla. These tools will also play a role in quickly navigating to the faulty elements during the troubleshooting process.

Finally, to implement continuous integration and continuous deployment, you can use Jenkins, GitLab, and CircleCI. These tools will also have a massive role in helping you to execute the development and testing phases at the same time.

Apart from this list, you should also keep yourself updated to all the new tools and technologies that are continuously coming in the market. This knowledge will have a major role in assisting your career growth in this segment.

Challenges in QA

Although QA testing is highly prosperous in the present industry, it also has its own share of challenges. Below, we have created a list of some of the major challenges that you must be aware of in this industry:

Technology is changing and it is changing very fast. It can be very complex to keep up with the new technologies and frameworks that are continuously coming into the market.

You’d also have to meet tight deadlines while balancing the speed and quality in the modern development cycle.

Quality assurance testing usually works on various complex systems that come with multiple dependencies. So, maintaining a smooth workflow will become a challenging task in this system.

In certain scenarios, you will face resource constraints as you will have to work with limited resources and budgets. So, ensuring the quality and timely delivery of the application in this scenario will be highly complex.

However, you can successfully overcome these challenges by implementing continuous learning, process optimization, and efficient collaboration with your team members.

The Bottom Line

Based on everything that we discussed in this article, we can safely say that building a career in quality assurance will offer various opportunities for specialization and also growth. By developing all the essential skills, grasping the certifications, and staying up to date with the market trends, QA professionals can improve their knowledge and build a successful career.

You must remember that QA is not just about finding defects, it is about delivering exceptional user experiences to ensure the reliability of your application and contribute to the overall success of software products. So, if you are passionate about technology and quality, QA will provide a dynamic and rewarding career path for you.