From Bugs to Brilliance: All about QA Testing

In this article, we will present what the job of a QA tester entails, the stages an application goes through during the testing phase, and what a day at work might look like if you hold this position.

What it means to be a QA Tester

QA stands for Quality Assurance and can be defined as a set of processes and requirements within an organization to ensure that a product meets certain standards before being released to the market.

QA helps increase users’ trust in the product and the team, while also enhancing the organization’s reputation by ensuring that the software meets technical standards and provides users with a greatly improved experience.

A QA tester is someone who not only ensures that all these processes are implemented within an organization but also consistently works to improve them.

One of the quality assurance processes is testing, which ensures that customers do not end up using software that does not meet business requirements or that has defects hindering the application from functioning correctly.

Even though developers test their own functionality after implementation, they still need at least one more set of eyes to carefully verify it. Testers do not know the implementation or circumstances covered by the developer’s lines of code, so they can create different testing scenarios and identify potential errors.

Types of Tests

To better understand what QA testers do, we need to know about some of the existing types of tests. This allows us to categorize examinations based on certain criteria, such as:

1. Based on the degree of automation: manual testing vs. automated testing. Your application testing methodology should combine both manual and automated testing. Each of these refers to a specific situation or stage in which the product is placed.

• Manual testing involves the manual execution of tests without the use of other assisting tools. Besides helping cover a wide range of scenarios and conditions, this type of testing provides invaluable feedback from testers about the application’s experience and feel.
• Automated testing requires the use of specific testing tools, such as Selenium, Katalon, LambdaText, Ranorex for UI, or various language-specific libraries used for backend testing.

1. Based on what is being tested: functional and non-functional.

• Functional testing verifies whether the application’s functionality behaves according to business needs. This includes unit tests, integration tests, regression tests, and smoke tests.
• Non-functional testing complements functional testing and is essential for validating the system’s performance under specific conditions and user experience.

Stages of the Testing Process:

The testing process can be divided into several phases:

1. Analysis of business requirements to prevent data gaps and specification clarifications.
2. Test planning to select appropriate tools and employ the right testing strategy.
3. Designing and developing test scenarios.
4. Configuring the testing environment, including preparing the necessary conditions and generating test data.
5. Conducting tests as per the test plan and identifying defects.
6. A meeting with the testing team to assess and, if needed, report the system’s quality performance.

Skills Needed for QA Testers:

Some of the skills every QA tester needs to excel in their role include:

• Deep understanding of the software, finding potential issues, and creating suitable test scenarios.
• Empathy to put themselves in the client’s shoes and create the most realistic and suitable tests possible.
• Communication with both technical staff like developers and non-technical personnel like clients.
• Creativity to design a wide variety of testing scenarios.
• Adaptability and openness to new technologies and testing tools.
• Discipline and focus, especially during lengthy and repetitive testing sessions.

A Day in the Life of a QA Tester:

A QA tester’s day can include a variety of activities. They might work on assigned tasks such as manual or automated testing of specific functionalities, developing test scenarios, scripting for automated testing, configuring testing environments, etc.

They could also attend meetings with the QA team to plan testing and specific strategies or join meetings with the entire implementation team to discuss and better understand developed features. Conferences and training courses also play a part in QA testers’ activities.

It’s worth highlighting that an application without defects, meeting certain quality standards, and providing the best possible user experience will always satisfy the customer. Therefore, QA testers play a crucial role in the product development process.