QA testers have one of the most important jobs in the entire development process. From finding bugs to ensuring the end product is easy to use, well optimized and compatible with a variety of devices, quality assurance testers have a diverse range of responsibilities.
These responsibilities require more than just basic knowledge of QA — they require a variety of skills, from excellent attention to detail to the ability to analytical and methodical in reporting and prioritizing bugs.
We’ve put together a list of the best qualifications and skills to have as a QA tester. Whether you need to hire a QA tester or you’re interested in becoming a tester yourself, consider these skills the “essentials” for carrying out accurate, actionable and successful QA testing.
An understanding of software
You don’t need to be a master programmer to be a successful QA tester, but you should have at least some knowledge of software development. James Bach of Satisfice Inc. believes it’s useful for QA testers to understand programming, as people that can write code typically have good reasoning skills.
Despite this, he believes it’s not essential for testers to have detailed coding knowledge: “I don’t think all testers should be programmers. It’s a hard skill to get good at.”
As a tester, understanding how software works (and how it’s developed) gives you a significant advantage in finding and fixing bugs. Understanding software is an important skill, but you don’t necessarily need to be an expert programmer.
Great analytical skills
Quality assurance testing is about more than just finding bugs — it’s also about analyzing bugs to determine which are the most important, which are the least important, and which require the greatest amount of attention.
This is where great analytical skills come into the picture. Testers that can identify bugs as more than just single issues but as parts of a whole are the best positioned to work out what needs to be prioritized to create a great application.
Discipline
QA testing is a repetitive process, and it’s easy for QA testers to lose focus after analyzing and reporting on on the hundredth test of the day. Since so much of QA testing is repetition, testers need to be disciplined and able to focus in a somewhat dull environment.
It takes a great deal of time to discover bugs, especially when you’re testing an application on hundreds or thousands of hardware and software combinations. Instant results are rare, and a great testers needs to be disciplined enough to work far beyond the bare minimum.
Communication skills
Many people think of testing as a solitary or small team process that doesn’t involve a great deal of communication with other stakeholders. In reality, QA involves a lot of communication with the project’s major stakeholders and demands great communication and persuasion skills.
Fixing bugs can be costly, and QA testers need to be able to clearly explain the risks involved in not fixing a bug and the benefits of fixing it. They need to be able to state the reasoning behind a decision that could delay release and convince other stakeholders of its importance.
In a way, QA is a sales job — instead of selling a product, QA testers and managers need to sell the importance of fixing a bug before release. Since QA testing generates more bad news than good, selling the importance of revisions and fixes to stakeholders can be a real challenge.
Even the best QA testers miss bugs. The crowd doesn’t.
No tester is perfect, and while the most thorough conventional QA testing process will find most bugs, it won’t catch them all. A ‘controlled crowd’ of testers let you access the skills of one tester on a scale that makes finding and fixing every bug much more achievable.
Our crowdtesting platform lets you access more than 25,000 QA testers in 120 countries to find your application’s bugs, performance issues and usability problems. Start your first crowdtest to discover the power of the crowd for QA testing your application, website or software.
MyCrowd QA is a self-service QA testing platform for companies to test their mobile apps and software. Utilizing a pay-per-bug model, customers only pay for the bugs our testers find.
