What’s Automation QA and why do you need it?
It involves quite a lot of stages of software development when a company’s building a product, may it be a mobile application or a full-fledged system. But no one wants it to be a failure that has lots of bugs. That’s why quality assurance plays a crucial role in product creation.
QA or Quality Assurance is a constant and well-ordered process that helps engineers to learn whether software meets specific and precise requirements along the way. In a nutshell, QA “assures” the high-quality of any IT product.
There are two types of QA — manual and automated. Let’s consider them both in more detail.
Manual Quality Assurance is a type of QA that requires an engineer to test products manually. They pay close attention to software development processes, prevent bugs, and try to foresee other malfunctions.
The scope of work of a QA specialist is quite demanding in terms of manual work. For instance, they plan testing processes, create test cases, pinpoint bottlenecks, and defects in them, make sure that developers fix defects, and then they re-test software. In this case they perform these tasks manually with no script or automation tools.
On the other hand, Automation Quality Assurance is another kind of software testing, which is different from manual QA. As the name suggests, this type of testing involves automation and tools that help a lot in this process.
The main objective of an automation quality assurance specialist is to create scripts, which are based on test cases created by manual QA engineers, that will test software.
There are lots of advantages that Automation QA has. And here are several examples of why you should use it.
- Such type of testing automates routine and repetitive tasks and minimizes manual work.
- It helps run test cases many times on a large scale, which is impossible to do manually.
- Automation Quality Assurance is time- and cost-effective. For instance, you can detect a bug earlier and, thus, save more money.
- You can automate test cases, which means that you can use them through various approaches.
- You can run tests round-the-clock because it doesn’t matter where you are, you can always rely on automation QA.
- Automated quality assurance allows testing on thousands of mobile devices, which is impossible with manual QA.
- There’s no need to have many engineers as only one Automate QA engineer is able to create scripts to automate all necessary testing processes.
- This type also helps you to run tests on various devices simultaneously, which provides you with comparison reports of these devices’ tests
- Moreover, Automated QA can be used side by side with Manual QA for result cross-checking.
To become an automation quality assurance specialist, you need to have a certain pool of knowledge and skills. Note that it can vary depending on a company’s requirements. Here are the main of them an Automation QA engineer should have:
- Knowledge of the full-circle of software development
- Experience with various reporting tools
- Know how to use Scrum/Agile methodology
- SQL and object-oriented programming skills and basic knowledge of programming languages that are required
- Knowledge and hands-on experience of types of software testing
To sum up, software testing is a vital component of the software development process as it helps companies release bug-free products into the world. And manual and automation quality assurance types become an integral part of quality software, with the latter to be the most effective way of testing as it has a lot of advantages. And to become a QA specialist, you need to have some basic knowledge and skills that are necessary for this IT profession.
You are welcome to start your career in Automation QA at DEVrepublik. Our curriculum is developed with the requirements form employers.
