Hello guys, today I am going to post about the different types of QA mindsets that exists and how you can identify them. As a QA Engineer your aim is to improve the quality of the product from the very beginning. If this is the main objective why we have so many different titles for a professional that works in the QA area ?
This is because you can find QAs that focus more on the business and product side of the project. Others are more technical and focus on the automation and improving the quality and the release speed of the product, and some others that like to do both, the business and the automation part.
What is the future of the QA professionals ?
We can notice that some QA pros are instead of running the tests and handling the hands-on work, they are transitioning into a more consultative and distributed role to help developers learn how to write better tests and improve their approach to screening for quality. Because, at the end of the day, developers are still developers and while they’ve not been trained to look for quality issues, they’re going to miss things.
QAs pros just need to adapt to a rewritten organizational hierarchy—and a completely different mindset about testing objectives.
You can spread this mindset to your entire team, not only QAs. Uncaught bugs and untested features could easily gradually destroy confidence in the new product and lead to a loss in traction. Knowing your development team can not only ship features quickly but avoid these costly mistakes may be the edge your app needs.
With the latest trends toward faster and more efficient software teams having developers doing their own quality assurance is more important than ever. It takes dedication and practice to build a QA mindset but the benefits of how it can help your team and product make it worth.
I am going to separate the QA mindset profiles following the market trends.
Traditional QE
- Perform Manual tests only
- Focus more on the business part of the project
- Able to perform Functional tests
- Create a lot of documentation, like Test Plan and Test Suite
- No contact with the feature until is Ready to Test
- Don’t have integration with development team
Agile QE
- Perform Automation and Manual tests
- Focus on the business and the technical part of the project
- Able to perform Functional tests
- Create Test Scenarios for automation and for the feature
- Help the Developers and PO to write the scenarios upfront
- Have some kind of integration with development team
Pos Agile QE
- Perform Automation tests only
- Responsible for configuring CI/CD
- Focus on the business and the technical part of the project
- Create Test Scenarios for automation and for the feature
- Able to perform Functional and Non-Functional tests
- Help the Developers and PO to write the scenarios upfront
- Share the automation knowledge with the developers
Developer QE
- Developer with interested in QA
- Implement the code and the automation code
- Focus on the implementation, but also on the quality
- Tend to over complicate the Automation project
- Has a QA curious and critical thinking when implementing
- Able to perform Functional and Non-Functional tests
- Test his own implementation thinking on the end user
There is also a misconception about QE:
Wannabe QE
- Doesn’t have a QA background
- Worked only on one type of industry or only on crowd tests
- Usually doesn’t know anything about type of tests (Functional or Non-functional)
- It only knows about the business related to the background they have
- Doesn’t know the importance of trivial tests like boundary tests
- Doesn’t really have interest about QA best practices
What I suggest for this last one is to study. If you want to work in this area, don’t undervalue the professionals that have studied and continue studying everyday to be here.
In general QEs are extremely curious and go always for the simple and cleanest solution. They are skeptical and nitpicker which are the most annoying character of a normal human hates to posses. But when it comes to a testing profession, these becomes a must have characteristics for a tester.
Resources:
https://haughtcodeworks.com/blog/software-development/qa-mindset/
http://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-qa-mindset/
https://techbeacon.com/qa-devops-reinventing-testers-role-face-automation
http://blog.qmetry.com/quality-engineering-mindset-devops/
https://dzone.com/articles/dev-vs-qa-should-there-be
https://qa.siliconindia.com/news/How-an-Ideal-Software-Testing-Mindset-should-be-nid-105831.html
https://www.slideshare.net/juliodelimas/mindset-do-qa-em-diferentes-contextos?trk=v-feed
Rafaela Azevedo 