QA engineers’ valuable role to play in the development process

So you have a dream team of developers working on your brand-new features. You have UI/UX experts, a professional project manager, and the most effective offshore software development practices. You fully realize the value they bring to your project. But there is one essential role missing from this list: the QA engineer. There is a perception that this role is overrated, but it significantly influences the development process. It can have a big impact each step of the way.

I didn’t know all of that when I just started thinking about entering the tech world. But it fascinated me, and I decided to make a career change.

Choosing the quality assurance department was, at first, because friends told me it was an easy initial step to take in the tech world, but not long after I started, I discovered I had fallen in love with it.

This post won’t give you guidelines on finding bugs, working methodologies, or writing the best test plan. I will share my point of view on how to work with product managers and developers and make an impact simultaneously. The development process has many steps that we, QA engineers, can effectively influence to get the best quality and change colleagues’ perspectives.

How I see the QA engineer position.

Is the primary goal of QA engineers to find defects? I believe it’s not. And you?

Releasing a new version with crucial defects gives customers the wrong impression, and we all know that’s a bad thing, right? One of the steps in software development is to find defects to ensure quality, but more essential is to have a deep understanding of each feature. Being a QA engineer today is actually being the person who gives alerts about concerns in the early stages, or potential problems. It is the person who sees the bigger picture from A-Z and ensures quality in each step of the process. If you ask me, we could be called superheroes (but that’s just me).

A QA Engineer is the Product’s best ally.

One major challenge is mistakenly presuming that a QA’s responsibility begins after feature development ends. This is an old and damaging assumption. An important thing to keep in mind is that QA engineers are key players in the development of new features and have a substantial impact on the entire process.

Teams can easily solve product problems by having QA engineers involved in development from the early stages and sharing their points of view. The QAs have to be engaged from their side, taking an active part in production during the development process of new features. This can help save time and money, as QA engineers often highlight potential hazards on issues that might lead to an element disqualification in the future.

The QA engineer’s job is always to challenge the product team and spot potential risks to assist the production manager in the development process.

Gloat’s quality assurance process: how does it work?

As a result of scrum methodology and scrum squads, each quality assurance engineer is responsible for a different domain, becoming the focal point for that particular field. Thus, they have a deep understanding of every area.

Early exposure to features and familiarity with them is one of the processes we implemented. The first time QAs meet a feature, they should challenge product teams by asking questions about the business, the value for the customer, what they are trying to solve. They should also challenge the solutions with what already exists and how it can be combined with the new desired features, learn about the feature’s purpose, statistics, rollout plan and how it will be released.

QA engineers become much more impactful and relevant when they are involved in the full development cycle of a product.

Together, QA and developers make a winning team.

While researching for this blog, I understood that there is a common belief that “QA is about pointing out developers’ mistakes and bragging about them.” I disagree with that statement, and this is our major challenge.

First, we must understand that QA engineers and developers share the same goal — to create a high-quality product. A few more challenges are:

• Lack of communication: this can cause various problems, such as delays in delivery and misunderstanding defects and their root causes.
• Who is responsible for quality during the development process: what should be covered by developers and what by the QA engineer? Unit testing? Manual? Or automation?
• QA’s technical understanding: does this include understanding certain programming languages? Understanding the systems’ specifications?

The new quality approach in Gloat and how it works

First of all, and the most important thing, is the understanding that development and QA are one team. They need to work in perfect cooperation to reach the desired results: finding bugs and understanding them, and devising the product in the fastest way. Recently, we decided to work on a new quality process in the company to improve our testing. We understood that the development teams had to be given more responsibility during product testing so that we could improve the work in the squad and integrate automation test writing into the teams.

Now, our new way of work is: QA engineers start preparing their test plan in the early stages in parallel to developers’ work to provide them with comprehensive test case coverage for the developed product. After the QA is finished, we set a meeting with the product, QA lead and developer to go through the test plan and verify that everything has been covered. The developer is responsible for ensuring the designed test plan is covered and tested by them (manually or through unit tests). The QA and developer work closely to ensure the quality is maintained.

As a tech lead at Gloat, I understand the importance of pushing the team forward, showing them new work methods, and helping all the teams implement this process. Several obstacles have hindered my work with different teams. However, with proper communication and an understanding of the needs of the teams, we are designing the process slowly to reach the most desirable result for everyone.

The most significant benefit of QA is that QA engineers can prevent defects from being implemented in the final product. It takes way less time to edit the specification or include a solution in the code than to rewrite it to try to fix something.

In other words, QA helps to correct mistakes and save your time and money from the very beginning of the project in the idea stage, during development, and even after product release.

The quality assurance position is a connecting link between people within different departments; it significantly impacts the company’s development of products and services.

It’s a position where I can be influential at every step in the development process.