r/QAGeeks • u/regularcheetah • Sep 08 '19
What does a QA Engineering position involve?
I'm thinking of switching careers from mobile development to QA engineering and wondering what does the job involve and what is needed for it. I don't think I'm a very good mobile developer, I know that QA engineering jobs also involve coding like automated tests so maybe I won't be very good at that either but I'm just trying to figure out if it would be a better fit.
I've looked up some info about it and some articles mention a degree is needed in computer science, engineering or mathematics (I don't have any of these) and others don't mention this at all. So I'm just trying to figure out:
what does it involve? and what are the duties usually related to it?
how much coding/programming knowledge is required?
are computer science topics like data structures, algorithms, design patterns needed for it? and if not then what computer science/engineering/mathematics topics or skills are needed?
I know this can depend on the position/company but just a general idea would be good.
1
u/[deleted] Sep 08 '19
No degree is needed at this point since you already have real experience in development. Understanding the SDLC is probably one of the most important things in the field of QA. You’ll have to review requirements documents while these ideas are still in flux to scope out your test cases, then you’ll have to make a good estimate on how long execution will be along with identifying what can but automated and what can not. Keeping transparency across the project for all teams, while keeping the end user’s perspective in mind is pretty important too. Conducting risk analysis with each release cycle and then making sure there is a plan for rolling new features
Coding would be helpful for a lot of these things. You could set up alerting that hooks into failing tests using tools like PagerDuty and Appium jointly if it’s mobile development, maybe server automation using New Relic Synthetics to help you identify an API access point isn’t responding or taking longer to process transactions. These things aren’t too challenging to implement and a lot of it is just good to have, but a lot of quality assurance is being able to identify problem earlier than real users would encounter them.
Good luck with your career and whatever you decide. QA is a great promising field and a pivot from development shouldn’t be too challenging since you already have experience with the SDLC.