QA Engineer/Analyst/SDET Role EXPLAINED-The Test Lead

The Quality Assurance role is one of the most essential roles in the Software Development Life Cycle process, however it seems to be one of the least talked about. The QA role goes by many names such as QA Analyst, QA Engineer, Test Engineer, SDET, etc., but the job focus remains to stay the same, to thoroughly test applications.

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What is a QA Engineer?

Now that I have hyped the role up in my introduction you may be wondering, what does a QA Engineer even really do? When an application is conceived as an idea, it SHOULD go through the proper Software Development Life Cycle which includes it being developed, tested, and then deployed to an end-user.

A QA Engineer’s role is to test and make sure that a given application meets certain requirements before it can reach an end-user. This is done in the process of creating tests, running the created test, and then documenting the results from their test. Any time a test has results other than what was expected, a defect or bug should be created. This should then be relayed back to team members to see if its priority level is high enough to need a fix now or could be fixed later after the deployment.

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How do you create tests for applications?

For each application that they are testing, a QA Engineer should create a test plan. In the test plan, there should exist different test cases that represent the different possible scenarios that the application should be tested for. In the test cases, a test script should be created that documents the exact steps for performing the test case.

The test plan should cover all of the requirements presented in the requirements analysis step of the SDLC as well as other test scenarios that they feel are adequate. Because part of creating tests may involve using the QA Engineer’s best judgment, it is important that they familiarize themselves with the application as much as possible. They must also be able to think from an end user’s perspective to make sure that different possible user interactions are covered in the test…