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Quality Engineering
min read
February 12, 2020
January 29, 2020

How can Quality Assurance Engineers truly own their projects?

How can Quality Assurance Engineers truly own their projects?
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Often Quality Assurance Engineers focus only on the testing responsibilities assigned to them. And that’s what our job profile is, after all. However, to excel at our jobs we need to walk the extra mile. We need to go beyond just writing test cases and scenarios. We need to take ownership of the project! 

Here are some ways in which a QA can exhibit their ownership skills: 

  1. Documentation for new experiments: If you are doing anything for the first time would it be a setup, POCs, configuration, etc. parallelly create a document with the steps followed and how you were able to achieve the particular task. Share this document with your team lead, get it reviewed and then share it with the entire team.
  2. Continuous improvements: Do not blindly follow the existing test templates of your project. For example, test plan template, test cases, acceptance criteria, regression test suite, bug reporting template, checklists for some common features, etc. Always share ideas and improvements around updating these existing templates. 
  3. Creating test suites: Always ask for a regression test suite, sanity checks or smoke test scenarios. If these are not already present or created, start writing your own and also introduce them to the entire team. Start using these suites for your test cycles and share the results with the team at the end of the test cycle.
  4. Sharing meeting updates: Creating meeting notes and sharing with the team is a good practice. This is very helpful and appreciated when you are a part of lengthy meetings. At the end of the meeting, having a list of all points discussed and sharing these points with other team members helps them recollect. 
  5. Feature ownership: Start taking ownership of features if multiple QAs are working on a project. For example, let’s say if any new feature such as “Checkout functionality” is in progress, you should work on its backend, frontend and all related tasks. You can always ask your Project Manager to allow you to do so.

 Advantages of doing so:

  • You can create test scenarios for this feature.
  • Time utilisation - since both backend and front end tickets will be tested by you, this saves time and avoids repetition.
  • Preparing a feature demo for the entire team.
  • Automating this feature (if needed or told to).
  • Possess knowledge of the entire feature flow.
  1. Share Knowledge: Always share your learnings from past projects with your team members. If you have experience of working on a related feature or technology, your prior knowledge might just save your colleagues some trial and error. For example, during sprint planning, you can come up with the edged scenarios or negative scenarios which are mostly missed by devs. This can help to reduce efforts.
  2. Utilise spare time: If you are running out of tickets, please do not wait for someone to assign tickets. Proactively, keep on checking the tickets that are in the development phase and going to be assigned for QA or the backlog tickets. Utilise this time for writing test cases, automation scripts or anything that will be helpful in reducing efforts.

Happy Testing!

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