What Does A QA Engineer Do? Roles and Responsibilities

Quality Assurance

Quality and efficiency are two of the most important pillars that maintain and boost your business's reputation. You may keep developing a lot of new features for your product and think that you will receive a lot of users but you may haven't noticed that those amazing features are failing to perform.

And, if the features and functionalities of your app keep breaking down, you will never be able to satisfy and retain your customers. They will eventually prefer other apps that may have limited features but they can trust the quality, consistency, and efficiency of those features.

However, you can also see your app reaching the heights of success just by putting a bit of strategic effort into testing it. And, this step-by-step process is called with the defining name “Quality Assurance” (QA).

It is a truly crucial part of your product's entire journey. QA engineers are the experts in planning, creating, and executing the tests as part of the QA process. Let's dive into the depth of this topic for a clearer understanding.

What Does A QA Engineer Do?

A Quality Assurance Engineer is a specialist in checking the codebase of a software product to find errors, bugs, and defects.

After those identifications, it becomes much easier for the development team to ensure that those defects do not appear again, and eventually, the quality of the software improves.

So, it is evident that QA engineers have immense importance in the product team in every technology business but the modern world is now preferring no-code testing tools like Preflight to enable every member of the product team to take an active part in the product's journey.

The future is shining bright with the help of amazing codeless testing tools like Preflight. However, being interested in QA, you must know every minute detail about QA engineers.

So, now, let's break down everything about them step-by-step.

Roles and Responsibilities of A QA Engineer

Though you can generalize the roles and responsibilities of a QA engineer as looking for ways to improve the quality of a software product, it can be divided into a few types for better understanding. Let's check them out below.

  • Improving the quality and efficiency of the software development process.
  • Preventing defects and bugs in production.
  • Ensuring that the development team is following the best strategy and moving on the right track.

Tasks Performed By A QA Engineer

Since long before the present no-code era began, QA engineers perform a lot of activities to keep the apps performing at their best. The tasks of QA engineers can tell you a lot about what QA engineers exactly do to achieve the best results. So, let's take a look at them.

  • Checking if the product is fulfilling its requirements according to its primary objective.
  • Analyzing and assessing the risk in different aspects of the product.
  • Planning the necessary test cases and test suite.
  • Executing the tests.
  • Analyzing the test results for best practices.

Types of QA Engineers

There are numerous functions in the sub-categorization of QA and they are called differently. According to the tasks performed by them, the types of QA engineers are as follows -

  • Software Test Engineers: Their primary responsibilities include planning the tests, creating the test cases, assessing possible risks, detecting defects, and reporting them to the development team.
  • Automation Testers: The reasons behind this name include relying on various testing automation tools like Selenium to streamline repetitive tasks, accelerate the testing process, and produce detailed reports on detected issues.
  • Test Leads: Similar to development team leads, test leads are responsible for defining QA processes, estimating, prioritizing, and planning testing activities.
  • Testing Analysts: The primary duty of testing analysts is to ensure that the development process, including test automation, aligns with the QA strategy and chosen development methodologies (such as Agile, Waterfall, Kanban, etc.). Their responsibilities also include performing manual and automated testing when necessary.
  • Test Architects: These experienced professionals are known for suggesting different approaches and techniques for effectively assessing different product areas.

Divisions of QA Engineers According to Their Roles

Though there are numerous things that QA engineers take care of, their main roles are divided into 4 categories that provide them with different titles. Let's check out those categories below.

  • Test Analyst: It is pretty normal that when you are investing a lot of time, effort, and resources into the testing process, you will surely expect the tests to be complete and consistent. And, the primary task of test analysts is to ensure these phenomena through static testing of requirements.
  • Test Designer: Every successful test execution requires a lot of planning and designing to move with the best strategy. Test Designers are responsible for creating those designs for the set of tests according to the requirements and configurations for the best efficiency.
  • Test Executor: Test executors work on one of the most crucial parts of the entire testing process. After all the strategies are made and the tests are planned, they now go on with executing those test cases to achieve the best efficiency.
    They also focus on the additional important steps that are describing the found errors through proper documentation and setting up the plan for fixing them along with following that plan.
  • Test Manager: It is almost impossible to run a long process efficiently without proper monitoring and management. And, it becomes even more essential when there are multiple teams from different departments involved.
    That's why test managers are an extremely important part of the QA team. Their duties include planning and monitoring testing-related works such as maintaining deadlines, following a schedule, controlling requirements for tests, setting tasks for team members, and communicating with stakeholders.

Such diverse roles and tasks may make you tense at some points. But, the good news for you is that Preflight exempts you from all the hassle of going through such a lengthy process. And, it also enables every member of your team to take part in any portion of the testing process.

So, drop the worry about hiring people with top-notch coding skills and let everyone from every team experience an efficient no-code testing process regardless of having coding knowledge.

Responsibilities of A QA Engineer

You have already seen how important QA engineers are for every technology business. But, what responsibilities do they perform that make them unavoidable in every software product's journey?

Well, for that, you need to go through the specific responsibilities dedicated to different categories of QA engineers. But, first, check out a general overview of their responsibilities.

  • Going through the requirements for testing any specific feature or functionality and planning the test cases.
  • Writing the test scripts according to the plans for the test suite.
  • Reporting bugs and analyzing the causes behind them.
  • Identifying suitable points for implementing automation to improve efficiency.
  • Reviewing the design, UI components, and product documentation.
  • Defining quality standards, metrics, and scoring parameters, using existing best practices.

The above-mentioned points provide a holistic view of the responsibilities of QA engineers. For a clearer idea, you must know them according to their specific divisions as mentioned below.

Automation Tester's Responsibilities

  • Writing and executing automation scripts.
  • Implement and perform automated tests using test frameworks and tools.
  • Implementing simulation tools that mimic users' behavior.
  • Generating automated reports and creating alert systems.
  • Documenting defects and issues with the application tested.

Test Lead's Responsibilities

A test lead is responsible for leading a team of testers and looking after their actions to ensure the overall best performance. Their responsibilities look like this -

  • Defining QA processes to be performed during each stage of the Software Testing Life Cycle.
  • Creating the best QA plan and communicating it to the whole team.
  • Prioritizing testing activities, creating tasks, and assigning them to the suitable QA professional who can perform them most efficiently.
  • Creating manual and automated test scripts.
  • Managing dependencies among QA engineers.
  • Test coaching and consulting.
  • Providing feedback about tests to the development team so that the best measures can be taken to improve the quality of the product.

Security Tester's Responsibilities

  • Reviewing the test requirements while focusing on the performance aspect of the application.
  • Defining performance metrics based on project requirements.
  • Implementing performance test tools.
  • Testing the application speed under different load levels.
  • Monitoring the changes in the product's response to different load levels over time.

Acceptance Tester's Responsibilities

  • Designing acceptance tests.
  • Replicating user behavior and modeling business rules to check if the system meets business requirements.
  • Performing beta testing activities.
  • Comparing results to the stated project requirements and generating reports based on them.

A Working Day In The Life of A QA Engineer

There is a typical concept among people that every role in IT forces you to constantly sit before a monitor and to become bored throughout the day because of quite similar repetitive tasks.

But, you will be happy to know that a QA engineer does not have to stay in that loop. This domain provides you with numerous opportunities to learn new skills and work on testing different products in different environments.

That means being a QA engineer enables you to stay in the exposure to new technologies, different browsers, amazing operating systems, etc. So, let's see what the daily activities of a QA engineer are.

Gathering Information:

The requirements for every test are very specific and different from any other test. That's why a QA engineer needs to gather all necessary requirement specifications so that the best-performing tests can be created and executed.

Documentation:

Any successful operation cannot proceed without an efficient strategy. Hence, QA engineers need to create proper documentation of the plan/strategy of the testing process by taking the requirements and goals into account.

Meetups:

The complete journey of a product involves many people from different departments and fields. And, as QA means improving the quality of the product, the QA engineer must know the thoughts and objectives of stakeholders, Product Managers, Team Leads, etc. to move ahead with a plan taking their concepts into consideration.

Touch Base with Developers:

Well, in simple language, this step can be called a discussion with developers. When you are going to check if an application is performing up to the mark or not, you must know everything about the thought process behind building it and no one knows that better than the developers who have built it step-by-step.

Writing Test Conditions and Test Cases:

After you have completed building a strong base for your tests, it's time to create the test cases. This is the phase where QA engineers write all the test conditions and test cases to achieve maximum efficiency.

Running Test Cases:

Only planning and setting up the test cases are not everything for achieving the best results. All those will become baseless if the test execution fails. Hence, QA engineers put a lot of effort and focus into ensuring that the test cases are run as per planning. However, amazing no-code testing tools like Preflight let you create and run tests within seconds even if you have no idea about writing test codes.

Discovering Bugs and Generating Reports:

The primary objective of testing is to discover bugs in the software so that they can be fixed to improve product quality. And, it is one of the most crucial responsibilities of QA engineers to generate detailed reports with complete information about the tests, the identified bugs, and the ways to fix them.

Retesting:

It is quite possible that tests cannot be properly run in the first go or they fail to complete their objectives. In such cases, QA engineers need to retest the software. But, the good news is that Preflight auto-records and saves the test cases when you create them for the first time. So, after that, it is a click-and-go thing for you to rerun the tests and analyze the recordings for better identification of bugs.

Importance of QA Engineers In Software Development

You have already got an in-depth idea about what vital position the QA engineers hold in your business. You are building a business to provide users with amazing products that have awesome features and functionalities with top-notch performance and sustainability. Yes, these two points are much more important than adding new features to your app.

That's why Quality Assurance holds the same or is even more important than pointlessly keeping on developing new features.

In brief, you can say that QA engineers are the persons responsible for ensuring the best quality of your software product by testing them rigorously for the best level of functionality, reliability, portability, usability, and maintainability.

However, with Preflight, anyone from any team can perform every role of a QA engineer even without any coding knowledge. You can know everything about that here.

The Futuristic No-Code Testing Experience

This article told you about how QA engineers work for testing your applications to eventually widen the ways of improving their quality. But, you must know that the present world is heartily accepting the amazing no-code tools like Bubble, Preflight, Mabl, etc. for no-code software development and testing with amazing efficiency. And, there are plenty of reasons to love those tools.

For example, Preflight allows anyone from any department (be it marketing, sales, finance, etc.) to actively take part in testing the applications. It also provides you with so many software testing benefits that you can scale up your business like you haven't even imagined ever.

You can know everything about those benefits in the article “10 Amazing Software Testing Benefits From Preflight In 2022”. So, it's time you should drop the worry about testing and start with booking a demo.