In the IT industry QA engineers and Software Testers are often mixed up: sometimes employers themselves do not see the differences between these professions. But there is still a difference, and quite a big one.

QA is a specialist with broader competencies. Unlike the tester, he controls the quality of the product from the moment of the idea to the release.

A tester is a variation of the profession of a QA engineer with a much smaller set of responsibilities and abilities. Often, a software tester is a person who receives ready—made documentation and conducts testing step by step. He has everything he needs: functions and certain requirements — he just needs to compare one with the other.
QA has much more roles.

Among other things, this specialist is responsible for the introduction of new techniques, monitors the relevance of the tools that the team uses in the project, introduces quality assessment metrics, monitors these metrics, draws conclusions from the values obtained and, possibly, changes something in the product.
QA engineers are in demand in a variety of fields: fintech, telecommunications, retail, medicine, education, public sector, logistics and marketing.

Regardless of which company the specialist works for, he performs approximately the same tasks:

-Analyzes technical documentation and product requirements at the software design stage.
-Develops testing scenarios.
-Testing the MVP — Minimum Viable Product — the most primitive version of the product, which can already attract the first users.
-Creates software quality metrics. They can be divided into two types: internal and external. The first include product properties that are visible only to the project team: metrics of size, complexity and style. External properties are properties that are visible to users. Here, the metrics of reliability, functionality, applicability and cost of the product are distinguished.
-Fixes the errors found.
-Monitors the processes of fixing bugs and errors.
-Re-analyzes the quality of the software.
-Monitors quality metrics.

Due to the new flexible methodologies of software development, the QA engineer works closely with the entire project team: testers, developers, analysts, managers. Sometimes QA interacts with other specialists, for example, system administrators and DevOps engineers.
If you need the best QA engineer for your company, please, contact krutikhina@globasgroup.com