What do QA Testers do?

What do QA testers do within company and how do Test Engineers fit into business, development and release processes? It may sound like a tricky tester interview question, but the answer will play a crucial role in whether or not QA Tester are hired. The developers usually think that testers job is straightforward and simple: testers have to annoy developers and break the applications. The developers also think that good testers is the one who can find a bugs, who can think like end user, but is it really true? The good tester is the one who can prevent a bugs and can think as business analysts, software architect, CEO, end user, network engineer and average user.

QA Tester should participate in the following tasks: develop a test strategy and test plan according to the functional specification of the product or even without specifications, prevent and find bugs in the product, test the the application and report issues back to management and developers and finally sign up the application for production.

In general the process may look like this. When the business analysts team feels that the requirements specifications are complete, it is given to the QA Testers team so they can review them and start working on test plans. In the same time they could review requirements and suggest some improvements. As soon as according to the project plan the developers have software specifications and a relatively stable application, it should be deployed and QA team can start working with the application, start finding and reporting bugs. After that developers will work on resolving issues and providing a new software build, while QA would verify that bugs are fixed or will be postponed for the future releases. Finally QA team will sign the project for the production release.

Depending of organization a tester's role tends to vary slightly with the nature of the software development process adopted. The waterfall projects tend to involve QA testers developing test plans, designing test cases and clarifying requirements during that process, executing them manually or with test automation tools. The agile projects are increasingly causing a mix between the responsibilities of QA Engineer and software developer, emphasizing testing from the perspective of customers who will utilize the system. Agile Testing focuses on testing iteratively against newly developed code until quality is achieved from an end customer's perspective. In other words, the emphasis is shifted from testers to something more like entire project team working toward demonstrable quality.