A website crash can be quite disruptive. Users can be turned off by software bugs. You’ve probably felt the annoyance of faulty technology firsthand. You can assure the seamless operation of websites and applications as a quality assurance (QA) tester.

What is a QA tester?

A QA tester works with software or a website to guarantee that it functions properly. They attempt to keep faulty apps or other technology from reaching the customer. While the product is being developed, QA testers perform a mixture of manual and automated tests. The purpose is to break or force the product to malfunction. This provides developers with the insight they need to make product changes before they go to market.

What do QA testers do?

Quality assurance testing is an essential component of the software development life cycle. It assures us that an organization’s product is of the highest possible quality. The following are a few ways QA testers contribute to the organizations for which they work:

Quality assurance saves time and improves efficiency. QA testing during the development process can aid in the early detection of errors. Fixing bugs and other issues early in a product’s life cycle might be far less difficult. It is also simpler for developers to modify code that they have recently worked on.

QA testers aid in the protection of brand reputation. QA testers use their expertise to predict potential problems and prevent them from occurring. This prevents a company from delivering a product that has bugs, crashes when too many people use it at the same time, or generally gives poor user experience (UX).

QA testing allows products to evolve in a safe manner. Scalability is critical for QA testers. One important aspect of their job is to ensure that new features do not jeopardize security or user experience. With proper testing, you will have a product that can be deployed immediately and scaled subsequently.

Quality assurance is critical to product safety. QA testers guarantee that not just user expectations but also government and industry criteria are met. They test, document, assess, and report their findings using particular protocols.

QA Testing Varieties

There are seven types of quality assurance testing:

Individual testing

The QA tester will frequently begin with unit testing, in which you will test specific software functions or unique testable product elements. You can better discover what has to be fixed if you divide the testing into tiny, manageable chunks. Following the testing of individual units, you can proceed to component testing, which connects multiple pieces of code.

Testing for integration

Following that, you must ensure that the various code components operate together. QA testing mixes and tests multiple units of code at the same time. If they don’t work when integrated, developers must perform further work.

System evaluation

This testing stage, often known as end-to-end testing, examines functionality more comprehensively. The goal of system testing is to replicate what consumers experience with the product in real life. 

Performance evaluation

When the software or website is in development, a small team works on it. However, when the asset is released to the public, it may have to handle hundreds of users at once. Performance testing demonstrates that the code is capable of keeping up. It examines performance across multiple user systems and stresses the program to detect bottlenecks or other issues.

Regression analysis

This step involves observing what happens to the product after adjustments are made. It ensures that solving one problem does not lead to the emergence of additional ones. 

User acceptance testing

User acceptability testing (UAT) is performed near the conclusion of development to ensure that the product or application does what its developers intended it to do.

Testing on mobile devices

Given that many people utilize mobile devices, this testing ensures that the product or program will work on these devices. Mobile testing, for example, takes into account smaller screens, less memory, battery usage, and what happens if someone receives a call while using that app. 

Distinction between manual and automated QA testing

Both human and automated testing methodologies play an important role in the SDLC. The decision depends on a number of criteria, including project needs, time limits, money, system complexity, and the testing team’s abilities and knowledge.

Manual testing requires QA specialists to test the product, but automated testing employs tools and frameworks to trigger tests in which user interactions are emulated by frameworks and tools to execute tests at scale. While manual testing takes more time, automated quality assurance saves both time and money.

QA Automation Tools for the Web and Mobile

There are numerous automation technologies on the market that cater to web and mobile automation. Here are a few of the most popular:

Selenium

Selenium is a popular and widely utilized web automation tool on the market. It’s an open-source platform that works with a variety of browsers, operating systems, and programming languages. It offers parallel testing and interfaces nicely with other software testing tools.

Cypress

Cypress is a modern, open-source test automation tool intended primarily for web application testing. It is developed on top of the JavaScript runtime environment, making it simple to use for JavaScript developers. Cypress is a popular test automation tool due to its numerous features and capabilities, including rapid and reliable testing, real-time reloads, automatic waiting, a time-travel debugger, and simple setup.

Playwright

Playwright is an open-source web automation library built on top of Puppeteer that is based on node js. It is compatible with programming languages such as Java, Python, C#, and NodeJS. Playwright is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license and is most commonly used with NodeJS and JavaScript/Typescript. Functional, end-to-end, and API testing are all supported by Playwright. It, like Selenium, allows for simultaneous execution of test scenarios.

Appium

Appium is an open-source framework that enables QAs to perform automated app testing on platforms such as Android, iOS, and Windows. Testing for Native Mobile Applications, Mobile Web Applications, and Hybrid Mobile Applications is automated. Appium is a versatile cross-platform testing framework that allows testers to build test scripts for several platforms, including iOS, Windows, and Android, using the same API. Appium, like Selenium, supports all languages that have Selenium client libraries, such as Java, Objective-C, JavaScript with Node.js, PHP, Ruby, Python, C#, and so on. 

What does a QA Automation Engineer do?

A QA automation engineer is in charge of creating and running automated tests to evaluate and analyze the functionality of the system under the test. QA automation engineers create tests, build test scripts, implement automation testing methods, and report the results.

They maximize test coverage, prioritize test scenarios, and construct execution plans accordingly.

Those are in charge of developing a solid automation architecture as well as implementing continuous integration and deployment. They must collaborate with other teams in order to gain ideas to boost productivity and test scope.

Final Words

By speeding up the testing process and giving a greater degree of accuracy, automated testing is a wonderful method to save time and money. We would have the best chance of catching a large number of problems and defects if we used automated testing in addition to manual testing.

Automation would not be able to accomplish everything for us. We still need to brainstorm on the automation build process, including selecting the suitable automation tool, planning, creating, maintaining, and performing continuous integration and deployment. However, some manual testing will always be required, and therefore cannot be totally eliminated from Software Testing.