Do you know that companies lose unbelievable amounts of money if a bug is not detected? Not everyone understands the real magic power of QA Engineers, and many people continue to underestimate their role in the project. In addition, for some mysterious reason, there are a lot of myths and misconceptions about the profession.
Tatsiana and Roman, QA Engineers at EPAM, dispelled some of them during our YouTube stream "Shaping Career as a QA Engineer".
MYTH 1: Testing is boring
For some people, testing might appear to be a routine procedure, but there is space for creativity in this job. You can explore, change and mix platforms, techniques, and approaches for testing. Although this profession includes analyzing and working with strict requirements, there is always an opportunity for a tester to use diverse styles while exploring the bugs.
MYTH 2: It’s hard to grow professionally for a QA
The biggest misconception about testing is that you can’t grow and achieve new horizons within a sphere. Some beginners also consider that QA is a temporary job, and after this stage, many specialists become software engineers. As in any IT profession, a tester may increase his title to a lead position. Or change the vector of development (but still working within testing), and become an Automated Tester or Performance Optimization Engineer.
MYTH 3: A tester is always a person to blame
Is a tester a troublemaker or troubleshooter? QA engineer is involved in every part of the development process, from writing the requirements to releasing a product. There can be a human factor, and a tester may miss a bug, but the main thing here is to accept the mistake and not hesitate to ask for help to fix it as soon as possible. QA can’t be blamed separately because they are a part of a team, and when something goes wrong, the root of the problem is on every project participant.
MYTH 4: Automated testing will replace manual one soon
It is not a secret that many things are now automated, and certain analysts claim that manual testing is nearly over. There are some systems that can be automated, but a QA helps to find specific and extraordinary cases, looking at the application as a user. A manual tester can see a full picture of the user’s path and a complete scenario which will emulate all his steps. Apart from this, almost all automated testers use test cases created by QA.
MYTH 5: QA is the easiest way to enter IT
On the one hand, entering the tech sphere as a QA is easier than as a developer because you don’t need to know any programming language. On the other hand, manual testers should learn some technical basics (working with databases or API requests, for example), as they often come across diverse bugs and defects. If you decide that QA is your passion and are ready to put more effort into learning, this tech-entering path would be much smoother.
Are you interested in QA? Watch the whole YouTube stream to receive more insights from our experts and break into the thrilling sphere and stay tuned with our future educational events.
