QA engineer profession in the information industry

With the pervasive use of software systems in modern society and people’s reliance on them in daily life, work, and societal functions, we need to make sure that these systems meet people’s expectations for quality and reliability. Most recently began to spread the direction of Quality Assurance in the IT-sphere. Quality Assurance (QA) - a set of actions that cover all stages:

development, production and operation of software information systems, taken at different stages of the software life cycle, to ensure the quality of the produced product.

Often people confuse the two concepts of QA and testing. Although Quality Assurance and testing have much in common, but these are two completely different concepts. The confusion comes because the two terms are often used interchangeably, as the QA concept fairly new, and only gaining in popularity in the modern world.

Testing - a bug detection, before it will find users, checking compliance with actual and expected result. Most often, check compliance with the functional specifications and software , or match the customer's requirements specification.

QA is primarily taking care of it as a software product in the form of preventing the appearance of bugs. The purpose of QA - is to ensure the required level of quality of the produced product, as well as its improvement. QA-engineers are beginning to think about the quality of the product from the very beginning: determined by processes, methodologies, standards, acceptance criteria, contractual obligations.

The methods by which this is accomplished are many and varied, and may include ensuring conformance to one or more standards, such as ISO 9000 or a model such as CMMI. Also, the product support in the development, issuance, implementation.

QA is an initiative group, their task is not simply to find defects and product approval, but first and foremost improve the quality of the product, its upgrading, modernizing. Also QA can offer Business Analysts (those who write the documentation, in accordance with customer requirements) ideas for improving the quality of the product. For example, the introduction of new technologies or replacement of existing technologies that accelerate the product's performance, will make a more productive, to smooth things over and better will be for the customer.

Already at start of the project QA have to evaluate all the risks and understand the weaknesses of software that may affect the operation of the system under certain conditions and notify the participants of the project, in order to avoid dangerous situations in which can stop the work of the entire system.

As the QA, and testers plan their testing, namely, make a test plan and testing strategy to make test cases. The projects often use multiple types of testing, for example, System Testing, Regression testing, Functional Testing, Performance Testing, Acceptance Testing, Usability Testing, Configuration Testing, Integration Testing, and so on. Types of testing can be very much. Consider some of them.

The main task of System Testing is to check both functional and nonfunctional requirements of the system as a whole. This identifies defects such as incorrect use of system resources, unintended combinations of user-level data, the incompatibility with the environment, unintended use cases, missing or incorrect functionality, the use of inconvenience, etc.

Integration testing is designed to test the communication between the components, as well as interaction with the various parts of the system (operating system, hardware or communication between different systems).

Acceptance testing is performed on the basis of a set of typical test cases and scenarios, are developed on the basis of the requirements for the application. The decision to conduct acceptance testing assumed when:

• •     the product has reached the required level of quality;

• •     the customer is familiar with the Plan of Work Acceptance (Product

Acceptance Plan) or other document, which describes a set of actions connected with carrying out acceptance test, the date of the responsible, etc.

Regression testing - a kind of testing, which is designed to check changes made to the application or environment, in order to confirm the fact that the functionality of pre-existing works as before.

Unfortunately, experts in QA do not let out University of the country. For QA is important to have the skills in software development, knowledge of standards (ISO 9001, ISO 27001, CMMI) and the development of methods testing. It is evident that QA performs many tasks and to become a professional in this field need to have an analytical mind, not necessarily know how to program in three languages, but to be familiar with this it is necessary, because the QA from time to time will be confronted with the code. Especially very useful SQL knowledge, since it is often necessary to work with databases. In order for the user to comfortably work with the system, it is important that all the bugs have been found and fixed, so QA should be careful. Of course, knowledge of telecommunications technologies are almost in the first place on the skills that qa engineer should have, since qa often knows best software. Аs well qa must be active and sociable, as they need to communicate with other departments.

Worked as a QA-Engineer you can at least rest of his life: different projects, different customers do not give "canned" Specialist constantly honing their skills, but moving is not vertical, but horizontal. If the expansion of horizons is not satisfied and there the desire to continue to grow professionally, moving up the career ladder, variants are possible:

• 1.    Become a senior or leading authority on quality assurance (Senior or Lead QA Engineer). The specialists of this class is carried out the same work as QA-engineer, but in more complex projects or run by a whole group of QA-engineers. You can also participate in the official certification for compliance with ISO 9001 and CMMI.

• 2.    Become a project manager (Project Manager).