QA
- QA engineer must be able to autonomously work on an issue (always assume you might be the only QA engineer on a team)
- Develop and maintain test cases
- Balance quality and progress
- Understand the QA impact of each individual task. If this is unclear, consult with the developer and product
- Work with other related teams within a project (or product)
- Balance when to reach out: don't waste days looking for a solution, if after a couple of hours you can't move forward, then ask for help.
- Own current state of quality of the product
- For example, QA engineer shouldn't be asking if the issue is known or unknown, they should know it
- Be proactive and own release testing when asked by engineers
- Be proactive communicating with the team
- For example, if someone asks a question, always give a response. Even if you don't know an answer right now, just say that you haven't seen it before or don't know how to help
- Plan your work according to priorities
- If you can't verify tickets because the environment is down - what is it that you are going to work on?
- If you don't have tickets to verify - what are you going to work on?
- Suggest new approaches which can help to improve our testing quality
QA Automation
QA Automation role has expectations as defined above for QA role and additionally:
- Own quality of automated tests
- Add new scenarios and update or remove old scenarios that are no longer providing value
- Optimize for the reliability of the product (have fewer but all stable tests)
- Suggest new approaches which can help to stabilize or speed up automation tests
QA Lead
- Own quality metrics
- Begin setting the vision / future direction of a team
- Impact across multiple teams within an org
- Expected to guide more junior QA engineers
- Create and maintain alignment within QA group at org level