Quality assurance engineers test all aspects of software applications to ensure they function efficiently, including the software code and how it interacts with other computer programs or devices. It is a competitive market, and many QA engineers are searching for jobs. Ensure you find the right candidate for your company before hiring a QA engineer.
As technology evolves quickly, quality assurance engineers must remain up-to-date on the latest testing tools to detect and fix bugs before they become widespread. This blog will provide tips on what to look for when finding a quality assurance engineer.
Why do Your Business Needs QA Engineers?
The quality assurance of software is essential at every step of development. With software quality assurance, you can be assured that your software is as robust and reliable. Even with the best code, there are vulnerabilities in coding — which ultimately lead to a security breach.
By partnering with a team of professionals who specialize in testing software, you can detect these vulnerabilities early on and get them fixed before they become a bigger problem for your company.
In recent years, quality assurance (QA) engineers have become increasingly needed. With the way technology is developing, new software is needed, and this can only be created when people take a deep interest in testing it.
Top Trends For Hiring QA Engineers In 2023
QA Trends 2022 is all about using the latest testing tools in the industry. Robot, Framework, Gatling Tool, Selenium WebDriver, and Selenium Grid can help with automation. Following are the top four trends for QA in 2023:
Also Read: Offshore Software Testing Best Practices: How to Ensure Quality Assurance
Artificial Intelligence For Testing
The introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) testing tools is likely to change how we test. We can only expect how we apply it and what it does. At a high level, developers can use AI to identify flaws in their code, making them more productive and efficient programmers. While hiring QA engineers, make sure they are well aware of the AI, as the technology has a wide scope in the coming time.
Agile & DevOps
In recent years, many organizations have adopted agile, especially software development teams working with distributed teams. Furthermore, as DevOps has become a more mainstream practice across organizations, it has also found its way into the world of software development.
Digital & Mobile Platforms
Digital and mobile platforms are becoming a more significant part of our day-to-day lives as we spend more time online using various devices. As these platforms become more common, development teams develop strategies to ensure that their applications function well on all these devices.
Test Automation
As automated tests become easier to create and maintain, more organizations are automating their testing. With test automation becoming so easy to implement, it’s no surprise that this would be on our list for upcoming trends. According to many experts, automated testing will evolve from a niche practice to one required by every project.
To stay competitive, you’ll need an automation strategy; there’s just too much risk involved in not having one. When considering your plan, you could take two methods — one involves scripted tests, while the other involves data-driven techniques.
Mobile Test Automation
Growing demand for mobile apps and a lack of qualified portable testers make it hard for businesses without enough resources to check their apps for bugs. Though hiring a dedicated development team may seem expensive, they are worth the cost since they would enable fast delivery of quality mobile apps. So if you plan to launch any new products, hire a dedicated mobile app developer team immediately!
Test Environments and Data
With all these latest testing tools, keeping track of which ones to use becomes increasingly difficult. Instead of figuring out which tool will work best for each situation and sometimes guessing wrong, try implementing something like xUnit frameworks. Understanding the importance of incorporating environment testing into your process requires experience with managing multiple environments, like how they grow over time and affect performance.
Integration of Tools and Activities
One of the latest testing tools to come to the forefront of a lot of discussions is things called batteries included. They are framework browser and server-side testing for web applications, integration testing for RESTful APIs, and headless browsers for front-end testing. They allow you to mix activities from different stages in the development life cycle. Hence, when hiring QA engineer, make sure the candidate is aware of this growing tool.
API & Services Test Automation
With the rise of API testing, we expect it to become one of the latest testing tools in the future. API testing has been around for a while, but it’s recently become more critical with increased reliance on API-based services and technology. The key to API testing is understanding how to use an API and creating test cases that simulate real-world usage scenarios
What Are The Requirements For A QA Engineer?
All businesses want their products and services to work flawlessly, so the job of a QA engineer is critical in ensuring software and hardware work properly. Quality Assurance engineers are specialized, and many businesses opt for dedicated development teams or agencies. Following are some significant points you should know when hiring a QA engineer:
- Curiosity: The candidate should be inquisitive and have a learning spirit
- Creativity: An out-of-the-box perspective to solve problems
- Detail-oriented: Should have an eagle eye for mistakes to ensure the error-free delivery of work
- Resilience: Resiliently learn from mistakes made by others
- Time Management: Hire a dedicated development team with proven experience in time management
- Quality Assurance Expertise: Hire QA engineers who have expert knowledge of QA techniques and tools
- Communication: Only if the candidates have good communication they will explain their findings and test results clearly
- Hands-on Skills: This can involve actual testing and all aspects of coding, including programming languages, databases, and operating systems
Hire a dedicated development team. If you cannot find enough qualified people within your company, hiring a dedicated development team with experience in testing applications will help.
When hiring your team, ensure they have at least 10 years of experience with mobile apps testing and app store acceptance test automation. Allow them to review your processes for documenting test cases and other procedures. It’s also essential to set up a system where different levels of access can be granted to various members based on their requirements.
Also Read: Advantages of Outsourcing Software Testing Services
What To Look For Before Hiring QA Engineer?
While hiring a QA engineer, you must assess his skills and industry knowledge. Ask if you’re looking for someone with a specific experience. Below are the steps for evaluating a QA engineer’s skills:
Prepare A Checklist
When looking for a quality assurance engineer, you want to find someone who is:
- Up-to-date on the latest testing tools
- Able to detect bugs and fix them quickly
- Detail oriented
- Organized
- Responsible
When hiring QA engineers, the absence of these skills makes candidates not a good fit for your team. You must ensure that they are experienced and have a variety of relevant certifications. Many QA engineers have multiple certifications because each has specific skills used when testing various products or software.
Hence, it’s essential to know what projects you’re working on before hiring a QA engineer to ensure they have the necessary skill set. If the engineer doesn’t already have certifications, it’s worth considering taking time out of their day to get some training and refresher courses to maintain and upgrade their knowledge base.
Reliability
If you’re looking for a quality assurance engineer, hire someone reliable and up-to-date on the latest testing tools. Only if the candidate is reliable will, the employer can assign tasks. The following tips might help you find the best engineers:
- Check their resume or CV to see if they have experience with the latest testing tools
- Ask them about the situations when they had to use a new testing tool to solve a problem
- If they are associated with any professional organizations related to quality assurance or testing
- Ask for references from previous employers or clients
- Make sure they are comfortable working with the software development team and understand the process
So these are some tips to help you find a reliable quality assurance engineer who will stay up-to-date on all your latest testing tools.
Interactivity
To find a quality assurance engineer that is up-to-date on the latest testing tools, you should:
- Look for someone with experience with various testing tools
- Find someone who is always learning new things and keeping up with the latest QA trends
- Ask for suggestions from reliable people in the industry
- Check out online job boards or staffing agencies specializing in placing quality assurance engineers
You can use many resources to find a QA engineer with up-to-date testing tools. By following these tips, you’ll be able to find someone that will exceed your expectations and help your organization launch new technology efficiently.
Functional Tests
Functional testing is a process where software is tested to ensure it meets the specifications. The Quality Assurance (QA) team usually does this type of testing. Various functional tests include unit tests, integration tests, and system tests. Knowing the latest testing tools is essential to be a practical QA engineer.
While hiring quality software assurance engineers, ensure they know the test cases to evaluate the product. These professionals execute various functional tests, such as unit tests, integration tests, and system tests.
End-to-End Tests
The testing tools that QA engineers use to test applications from start to finish are end-to-end tests. End-to-end testing is crucial to ensure the application works as expected and there are no errors. End-to-end tests can be time-consuming, but they are worth it to provide a high-quality product. This type of test help verifies your application works correctly.
The process usually starts with a business requirement and then develops test cases, sometimes using automation tools like Selenium WebDriver. As a best practice, one should always have unit and integration tests for verifying individual code units, but end-to-end testing is necessary to verify how everything works together.
This testing requires QA testers to be familiar with development tools since they need access to source code or technical knowledge about an application’s structure or working principles.
Automation Testing
The automation testing landscape is constantly changing, with new tools and frameworks appearing. To keep up with the latest QA trends, QA engineers must be proactive in learning new testing tools.
Automation testing is essential in any software development process and tools to ensure that software is of the highest quality. It’s also worth noting that not all testing tools are appropriate for each type of software product. For example, some are better suited for mobile applications, while others work better for web-based products.
Must Know Tools For QA Engineers
If you wish to be hired as an IT tester, you should know the current testing tools in your field. These are the top five latest tools every QA engineer should know about, so brush up on these if you want to stand out in the hiring process. They’ll ensure you can create tests efficiently and succeed. Here are the latest testing tools:
- Behave: It is a lightweight behavior-driven development (BDD) framework built to run on top of JUnit and TestNG. Behave was created out of a need for a simple testing framework with expressive reporting capabilities while offering everything necessary to write good tests effectively. It includes all the most commonly used BDD tools — given, should, then — and powerful reporting that allows you to test even complex problems effectively.
- JBehave: Open source extension of the popular Java library JUnit, adds various language extensions that help users create executable specifications in plain English without needing any programming skills.
- Cucumber: Cucumber captures system requirements at a high level using natural language format; these requirements are transformed into automated acceptance tests in graphical interface and console mode, which can be easily executed before any coding starts for application build.
- NIST Calibration Toolkit: The NIST Calibration Toolkit was developed to provide engineers with free access to reliable methods for calibrating their instruments against standards when dealing with measurements made in electromagnetic fields.
- Selenium: Selenium is an excellent tool if you’re looking for a robust testing mechanism that can automate web browsers. It is open source, has great community support, and can be used with various programming languages. Plus, selenium can be used to test both web applications and mobile apps. However, one downside of Selenium is that it’s challenging to learn if you’re unfamiliar with programming.
- Test IO — It is a cloud-based test management tool that automates testing across environments, browsers, and platforms. No code or particular setup is required as it provides a flexible drag-and-drop user interface with pre-configured templates to test cases seamlessly. With the right set of tools, QA engineers could find a job that suits them perfectly.
- Testdroid — It is a set of tools that enables running automated test cases on real devices. It supports multiple OSs, platforms, and device models, including Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. It includes mobile device management features for managing different mobile devices for testing.
Challenges Of Hiring QA Engineer
Several challenges come with hiring a software assurance analyst, like finding & retaining top talent in an already over-saturated job market. With such high demand, an employer must offer competitive salaries, benefits packages, and professional development opportunities to stand out.
Companies should also be sure they have a clear idea of how they want to attract qualified candidates who fit the position. When interviewing new prospects, firms should consider how the individual would interact with team members because this quality is one of the crucial things companies consider when hiring a QA engineer.
Career Paths For QA Analysts
QA Analyst, who is also known as Quality Assurance Analyst or Quality Assurance Tester, is a person who performs testing on software to find bugs. The work can be challenging & tedious, but it can also be rewarding. It may require long hours of sitting at the computer, using a variety of programming languages and platforms such as Java, Python, or Ruby. The carer prospects of QA analysts are:
- Product Manager: Write a professional post based on the description: Inventors With The Best Ideas To Change Lives Of Millions Of People.
- DevOps Roles: DevOps is a relatively new job role that started gaining popularity in 2016 and will continue in 2017. Most big software companies have begun implementing devops strategies into their business and have created complementary functions, such as release engineers and operations analysts.
- Customer Experience Leader: A crucial part of this role would be analyzing how customers use the product, how they react to specific changes made, and act accordingly.
- Enterprise Architect: Like the previous role mentioned above, this position requires extensive knowledge of architecture and management concepts.
- IT Management: Becoming an IT manager might sound daunting, but it’s pretty easy. You’ll need a few years of experience in related roles, industry certifications, and good interpersonal communication skills.
- Quality Engineer & Strategy: Every engineer has their strengths and weaknesses. To get the best output possible, it’s essential to hire people who match well with your team’s needs.
Conclusion
Hiring quality assurance engineers is a complex process, and you must take the time to find the right person for the job. You should seek someone experienced and a team player. Some key skills include problem-solving, debugging, and testing. You should consider how much you will pay an engineer and any benefits from their salary.
You should also try to anticipate future needs and plan for growth by hiring an engineer who can grow along with your team. Many companies start small and then add on as they see fit. Hiring a QA development company would be the right decision to ensure the success of your project. ValueCoders has top QA engineers who will take care of your project. Connect with our team and experience the best-in-class services by India’s leading IT company.
