Do you know the difference between a QA and a Tester?
The first thing we need to know is: What do a QA and Tester do on their daily work at a software development company? Both profiles are aimed for delivering high-quality products to their clients, but a QA does so by improving the quality of the development process, and a Tester improves the process of finding bugs on your system during the development cycle.
First, What does a QA do?
The main purpose of a Quality Assurance is to improve the quality of the company by working closely with the product’s owners and developers to make sure the products they offer add value to the client and have good quality. They work closely to the developers during all the software development life cycle.
Now, What does a Tester do?
A Tester is the person who plays with your toys (products). They may or may not know how your app works (Black Box Testing or White Box Testing) and their duty is to try to break it by all means by applying test cases, user stories and more. Testers work during all the development cycle to find failures (bugs) and report them to the developers.
Let’s ‘blend’ them together
Both roles are important and none of them is better than the other. Both of them seek to improve the software’s quality. So let’s blend them together to have the best of both worlds, and focus on preventing problems instead of fixing them.
With this profile (QA Tester), we have a professional who seeks the improvement of the quality of the implemented processes, in order to create the best products. Their role has the best of both QA’s and Testers, all of this based on the principle that every aspect of the work proceeds with the best practices on every stage.
Then, What does a QA Tester do?
Their task is to reduce risks, prevent bugs and improve quality by finding defects.
Testers do this through the light on ambiguity: this means testers do not prevent bugs from actually ‘happening’, they spot the bug in the shortest time possible (“prevent bugs”). This is an early bug detection.
They do not only create simply bug reports, but they run several tests in order to ensure that the product meets all standards, satisfy specifications and requirements. They also work closely to developers to correct issues.
Another kind of Testers:
Developers: They implement functional testing by using Test Driven Development (TDD) where code is created, tested and reworked until this passes the tests.
Client: They are the final users, and they are the ones who are going to use the developed system.
Why does a QA Tester have to be present since the beginning of the process?
QA Testers must be involved in the development process as early as possible because errors are much cheaper to fix in early stages than defects or bugs which are found by users. They can prevent these defects by removing ambiguities from specifications, identifying issues and anticipating future problems, providing feedback for quick resolutions.
QA Testers make sure they release a great software product in the market; their job’s responsibilities facilitate a quality product, not only ensuring a bug-free software release, but also achieving a high level of user satisfaction.
Having a QA Tester since the beginning of the project will significantly benefit the overall quality, it will help developers maintain higher quality standards, and have a lower number of errors, achieving greater satisfaction and usability for the end users while avoiding the high costs of future repairs.
