What Are The Responsibilities Of Quality Assurance Engineer?
There is no insurance from stumbles in development process. It is simply impossible to foresee and consider all factors — either technical or human — at once. In spite of that, early involvement of a Quality Assurance engineer in a project allows one to drastically reduce, if not completely prevent, most of the risks. Now you might ask: “What is so special about these guys? What do they even do? Why should they be paid?”. For this reason. we’ve decided to cover some of the main QA engineers’ responsibilities to give a better understanding why their participation in commercial projects development is so important.
Requirements definition and analysis
It’s no revelation that running a business is a very time-consuming thing. Clients may not always have an opportunity to come up with a full problem description and complete requirements specifications. Because of that, developers often have to deal with superficially presented concepts, e.g. quick drawings, short diagrams or just a couple of phrases. In such case, only the most tech-savvy experts are able to correctly interpret the idea and work it up into a right shape. But those guys are normally busy with even more intricate matters.
This is where a QA engineer steps in to quickly puzzle out sketchy ideas and make sure they are elaborated in the right direction. What is more, direct communication with the team allows him to instantly clarify any technical related issues. As a result, the client doesn’t get distracted by trivial questions while developers can fully focus on incorporating their best practices into the client’s product.
Сhecking updates before deployment to production
Developers can’t always keep everything in mind. Sometimes they need a pair of fresh eyes in order to make sure no defects have slipped through their fingers. And since QA engineers don’t usually go deep into implementation methods and tons of code, they are able to look at problems from different perspectives.
After an update has been prepared, it undergoes thorough checking for bugs. Next, the update is deployed to staging servers where they conduct regression testing to ensure project’s integrity. This is especially recommended for complex projects that have grown beyond the startup stage. And even though regression testing requires a great deal of time, its reduction may — and most likely will — lead to having serious bugs on production.
So, entrusting the testing procedures to a QA engineer not only saves an enormous amount of the client’s time and effort but also brings the whole update preparation to a new quality level.
Client support
It is the Quality Assurance engineer who always has the broadest picture of a project as he spends most of their time testing every piece of functionality inside out. He knows exactly which one of developers has the best expertise in a specific part of the project. This allows a QA engineer to promptly send new client’s requirements to the right member of the team.
If something has failed, a QA engineer collects necessary information to analyze why it happened and then forwards the result to developers. Again, the benefits are clear: developers are spared from precious hours wasted on searching for possible failure causes while the client is able to attend to more urgent matters.
Suggestion of new features
After the client comes with some new feature to implement, a QA engineer is always there to make an exhaustive task description for developers. On top of that, he can also suggest where else this feature could be suitable as he considers the project from a user perspective.
There is one slight problem, however. Implementing new changes often requires other parts of the project to be changed as well. In this situation, a QA engineer can identify these parts and tell developers what exactly needs to be changed.
Process optimization
Development optimization is a continuous process. Bad updates or delayed releases affect the cost of a product. It’s also not a secret that developers are very synthetic in their approach to solving problematic situations. If they encounter a difficulty, chances they will choose to simply work around it are very high. A quality assurance engineer always monitors if there are any negative trends in the workflow to discuss them with the team and be able to come up with a solution. In this regard, a QA engineer also contributes to the overall improvement of the development process.
So why Quality Assurance engineer is so important after all?
Nobody wants to receive a product that fails to work as it is supposed to. A QA engineer is someone who monitors every phase of the development process and makes sure that the website, mobile app, etc. complies with the standards set by the company and meets the client’s requirements to the full extent before it is released to the public. Even high-quality code might, for some unexplainable reason, work not as intended. And in this case Quality Assurance engineer is able to consider a product as one rather than just a bunch of technologies.