W. Edwards Deming, a legendary quality guru, says, “Quality is everyone’s responsibility.” There is an old “everybody, somebody, nobody” trap where you entangle yourself if you don’t take Deming’s quote seriously. Another interesting quote from Deming states “Quality starts in the boardroom.” It means the management is responsible for quality ultimately. Quality rests not only with management but also with everyone in the quality culture. The goal of every team member should be to ship great software on time. Let’s go through the content to check the individual roles of test managers, engineers, analysts, and architects in their collaboration for maintaining quality in software and mobile app testing scenarios.
Quality – Once Upon a Time
In the landscape of the Waterfall model, the job responsibilities of everyone were different, and it was a usual scenario with an older testing approach.
- Business analysts used to write the requirements
- Developers used to code the requirements
- QA Software Testers used to test the requirements
We know quality is synonymous with software testing. However, many people in the full-stack software development process think the quality is restricted to the tester’s job responsibility.
Quality – Present Day
Today, the agile team is the buzzword as it breaks down barriers that divide quality into the responsibility of individuals. Now, quality is not the sole responsibility of QA Software Testers anymore. Every member associated with the full stack software development product, to any extent, needs to own quality. What makes any agile team fit for product quality is the mindset that accepts everyone is responsible for quality.
Quality does not come naturally. From QA software testers to full-stack software developers to leaders, the team sticks to quality quotient at all stages of full-stack software development. Quality is built-in, and it is expected that testing detects defects only. On the other hand, the ultimate goal of software quality assurance (QA) is to prevent defects, and that is why the team that owns quality is willing to back to it in any way it can.
Different Roles and Quality Adherence
Many people are involved in software product quality, from the lead to the manager and QA analyst to QA software testers. All have their responsibilities and roles to play, and they produce superb results when they act together as a team.
Test Lead/Manager
- Define software testing activities for QA software testers or test engineers
- Take all test planning responsibilities
- Check the availability of resources to execute test activities
- Check testing status in all full-stack software development phases
- Prepare the status report of software testing activities
- Interact with customers and clients
- Update project manager about progress frequently
Test Engineers/QA and QC Testers
- Carry out regression testing in sync with coding
- Decide testing patterns and methods
- Define the priority and severity of each defect
- Execute test cases and report defects
- Inform test leads about resource requirements
- Prioritize software testing activities and develop test cases
- Read documents and understand software testing needs
Manual QA engineer
- Analyze requirements and prepare a query list
- Conduct a software check manually
- Conduct exploratory testing
- List improvements and create detailed reports
- Participate in test planning meetings
- Provide feedback to the software testing team
- Verify cross-platform and multi-device consistency
- Write and execute test cases to find usability and performance issues
QA Automation Engineer
- Carry out automated regression tests after every update
- Release of the new software version;
- Run performance tests
- Set the priority for automation scenarios
- Write documentation on automated testing and tool selection
- Write test scripts
Test Analyst
- Compare results to ensure products meet requirements
- Curate QA engineers’ work and clarify software testing requirements
- Design test cases and define specific tests,
- Focus on business tasks along with technical aspects
- Prioritize software testing tasks and monitor the test coverage
- Schedule test execution and deliver test documentation
Software Test Architect
- Maintain well-designed and sustainable test architecture
- Ensure the QA engineer and test analyst work efficiently
- Optimize the software testing process
- Identify technologies and tools aligning with business goals and company infrastructure
- Monitor software testing effectiveness to improve software testing practices
How to Build Quality in Software Testing Teams
There are lots of ways through which you can build quality in the software development process innately. First of all, a healthy relationship among the team fosters an association between QA and development. It is also a great way to break down silos between the two groups. QA Software Testers can get better advice and input with the help of scrum masters.
QA Software Testers can search for product owners to have candid opinions for giving and receiving feedback about test cases and defects. The outcome will be building robust and quality relationships between software testing teams.
You can also try an opportunistic pairing technique for building quality. This technique may include the QA software tester and the QA software tester; the full stack software developer and the full stack software developer; the full stack software developer, the product owner, and the full stack software developer. The best benefit of pairing is eliminating or reducing the need for post-implementation code reviews. It also gives you freedom from rework. Everyone in the team gets better visibility into quality tasks and thought processes. Professional and quality-oriented software testing experts work in a team to overcome all software testing defects conveniently.
When there is a team, the team members likely get questions on redesigning, focus shifting, planning, risk calculation, sprinting, or test validation. Overall, quality is everybody’s responsibility, and it engages everyone and enables a team to believe that quality is everyone’s responsibility. To get more technical updates related to mobile app development services, web, ServiceNow, and Microsoft Dynamic 365 follow us.
