Sr Software QA Engineer

Manual QA Testing Los Angeles, California, United States

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Summary

One thing that is important in the Quality world, specially software quality, is perspective. How each team member approaches their testing strategy is something that comes from their own perspective, and that comes as an amalgamation of both life and work experience.

A mantra that has followed me around for some time now is "Developers are your friends. Be a friend to them." Sure, you can always encounter that exception, the developer who feels attacked when a bug is reported against a part that they worked on. It's natural because we tend to perceive what we do as part of us. It's easier to deal with these situations when there is a healthy line of communication between teams and the individuals on those teams. So, don't engage in "devs vs. testers" politicsthat dynamic is one of the worst work environment killers ever.

What you can do is help the other teams by testing earlier and getting involved in defining tests as soon as there are requirements defined (yes, even before any code has been written). If you share these early testing scenario definitions with developers in particular, you can help them take a test-driven development, or TDD, approach to their coding. If you let them know what and how you are going to test, they will have that in mind when coding to ensure that those test scenarios pass your scrutiny. In addition to the development team, share the test scenarios with the business side so that they can assess whether you are omitting certain requirements from your testing or see that they overlooked putting something in the requirement definition (it happens).

Think of your job as being the liaison between the business and the technical side: if you do a good job of translating those business requirements into technical test requirements, you will help developers code better, accounting for both business needs and the technical specifications.

Expectations

I'm looking for work that has a social impact (or at the very least not work for a company that is actively doing harm in pursuit of profit); so no defense contract work or any corporations tied to the defense industry