Get[Devs] has found that too many software development companies have fallen into the same repeating pattern when looking for, hiring and building a quality assurance team. Quality assurance teams are not the place where you skimp on professional abilities. In other words, you do not place people on this team because they have failed to live up to your expectations on your software development team or another part of your business. If someone is failing to live up to the expectations of their current position, your retrain or fire them. Build your qa team with capable professionals. After all, they are the last ones to use your software or product before it gets to your clients – you want the best of the best here!
While your Quality Assurance Engineer has to have many programming and management abilities, not everyone on your qa team has to be at that experience or professional level. This is good, as you can hire those with good quality assurance skills for less money. So, what are the most important qa skills each team member should have?
Important Skills of a Quality Assurance Team
The ability to learn new things. Your project is not a copy projects your QA tester has done before. It’s new, the definition of ‘development’. When you have a great tester, they enjoy digging into new things and learning about them. It helps them make the most of testing.
The ability to prioritize. While this skill is most important to have in a Quality Assurance Engineer, as they will be setting the priority of the jobs for the QA testers, it is also important for the testers to have this skill.
Has a solid foundation of technical skills. Whether this comes from experience of education, it doesn’t matter. You also do not want to get caught up in whether the technology is the current one you are using. Remember the first skill, you are looking for someone who has the ability to learn. If their technical skills are solid, they will catch up with the programming and testing on your job quickly.
Has a basic knowledge of test tools. Does not have to know everything, but should have some knowledge and experience in what tools you would use for which type of testing. They should be able to describe some tools and how they would use them.
Your qa testers should all be able to communicate precisely and clearly. When describing a problem they should be able to do so both verbally and in written form without taking too much time away from their work. On a side note, you do not want to hire anyone who ‘hates to fill out reports’. While testing and even for programming, is what the job is about, the reports are how the job gets completed. You need someone who sees this as an important part of their job and is willing to do it well.
In the QA team you need members to have excellent problem solving skills. Those skills will help each team member take the bugs they find and fully test them out, knowing when it happens and perhaps why. The more information about the bug that the quality assurance tester can give a programmer or other developer, the faster it is going to get fixed and possibly without causing more bugs.
And last, but not least, your quality assurance team should be persistent and focused. You may feel that these skill should go without saying, but they are even more important in a QA professional than they are in any other employee. As the job of a quality assurance tester can get quite boring – especially when things are going well with the program they are testing – staying focused is imperative. Being persistent and doing all the testing needed is also important. You want your QA testers to test the last 10% with the same level of focus as they did with the first 10%. Otherwise, bugs will get through.
The skills above, while not comprehensive, do give you an idea of the type of quality assurance members you what on your development team. Once you find these people – and Get[Devs] is here to help you – your projects with be given an A+ in quality by your clients.