Have you ever opened up Google Maps, typed in a destination, and just assumed everything would go smoothly? Of course, you have. We all do. You trust that it’ll just work—that the app will find the fastest route, avoid any roadblocks (literally and figuratively), and get you where you need to go without any problems.

But have you ever wondered, even for a split second, what would happen if the app didn’t work? And I’m not talking about what if we had to use paper maps again. We’re talking about app failure. Like, what if you opened the app and all the roads were just…gone, or the GPS had no idea where you were? Or—a worst case scenario—after an update, it starts directing (or misdirecting, in this case) you down one-way streets in the wrong direction? Sounds like a nightmare, right? I’m personally in the first camp. I trust the app to work when I open it and navigate somewhere, and I try not to think about the ‘what ifs’ but…someone, somewhere, is asking all these questions and more to make sure software and apps like Google Maps work the way they’re supposed to. They’re putting systems and tests in place to make sure that happens.

That’s the work of quality assurance (QA) engineering.

Keep reading to learn everything you need to know about QA engineering—what it is, how it works, and how you can learn how to do it.

And the next time you hop in your car, pull up Google Maps, and start driving without a care in the world, just know that QA engineering is part of the reason why it won’t lead you straight into a ditch.

Table of Contents

• What is Quality Assurance?
• What is Quality Assurance (QA) Engineering?
• The Four Steps of QA Engineering
• QA Engineering Techniques
• What Are the Most Common QA Engineering Tests?
• What Does a QA Engineer Do?
• Job Market Outlook for QA Engineering
• How to Learn QA Engineering

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What is Quality Assurance?

Before we get into the details of quality assurance (QA) engineering, let’s talk about the basics of quality assurance itself.

Quality assurance is all about making sure that a product or service meets a set of standards before it ever sees the light of day—and more importantly, before it ever reaches the public. Then there’s quality control (QC). While they sound similar, they’re not quite the same thing. QC is more of a “let’s fix the mess after it happens” approach. It’s reactive—once the final product is made, QC steps in to find and fix any issues. If you’re thinking that it’s not always ideal to catch issues after something goes to market…you’d be right. On the other hand, QA is proactive and focuses on preventing issues from popping up in the first place. It’s about setting the stage so a product can meet its requirements throughout the entire process.

Take the production of Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal, which is a personal favorite. If you think about cereal production, QA helps prevent issues during production. The process involves making sure that only the finest wheat, sugar, and cinnamon hit the production line. Then, QC checks the cereal after it’s made. This involves unexciting but important tests for texture, moisture content, and contamination levels. Quality controlling Cinnamon Toast Crunch also includes the more exciting elements—sensory analysis (taste, smell, and appearance)—and making sure it has the titular “crunch,” the right amount of sweetness, and yes, even the taste you can see. QC is catching problems before they reach the customer, but QA is meant to stop problems before they happen.

Now, this quality assurance thing obviously isn’t just confined to breakfast cereals. QA pops up in just about every industry (B2B and B2C), and while we’ve been talking about products and services generically, when we discuss QA engineering, we’re going to be specifically talking about software.

What is Quality Assurance (QA) Engineering?

So, what is QA engineering?

QA engineering is less about building software (that’s what the developers do) and more about testing it. It’s all to make sure it meets the required quality standards and does what it’s supposed to. This means setting up tests, picking the right tools, running them, and simulating how users will interact with the software—all to catch issues as early as possible.

Software can be a bit different from most other industries, though. Unlike industries where QA focuses strictly on development, software isn’t static (at least not in today’s world). It’s iterative—a fancy way to say it’s constantly evolving with frequent updates, fixes, and new features. This makes software QA a bit of a hybrid of QA and QC. It’s proactive like QA (making sure everything’s in place before testing even begins) and reactive like QC (testing the software repeatedly to catch any bugs or glitches that might pop up). While QA engineering is a little of both, the goal is always the same: make sure the software works before it hits the user.

It’s about building trust—in the software development process, in the product, and from the users. When a user trusts that the software will work the way it’s supposed to because it has worked in the past, they’ll be happy, loyal, and more likely to come back.

The Four Steps of QA Engineering

Okay! Let’s see if we can break down QA engineering in a way that doesn’t make your eyes glaze over.

A lot of QA teams work with something called the Shewhart Cycle, or the Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) cycle, which is a strategy designed to help teams make small improvements and keep things moving forward. It’s all about continuous improvement—the ever-present goal of software development.

Here’s how the QA engineering process fits in:

Step 1: Plan

There’s a little bit of product management involved here. You can’t just start coding, let alone testing, without clear direction. You need to figure out what success looks like. QA engineering teams ask themselves: Who’s using the software? What do they want from it? This is where they spend time going into the project’s goals, requirements, and what “quality” even means for their software.

So, how do they get it right? They need to:

• Understand the user. What does the target audience need? The goal is to set clear expectations before testing begins.
• Analyze the project requirements. This includes functional (the “what does it do?”) and non-functional (like “how well does it run?” or “is it secure?”) requirements. More on these later!
• Set standards. There are official standards (like the ISO 9000 series for quality management systems), but QA teams can also create their own internal standards based on the kind of software they’re working on.
• Design the test plan. This is where they lay out exactly how the testing is going to go. What tools are they going to use? Who does what? This step is for mapping out everything from test procedures to member roles. And this should include testing early and often. Fixing problems later on is way more challenging and expensive.

Step 2: Do

Once the plan is made, it’s time to execute it. Here’s where the QA engineering team checks to make sure that the software is working the way it’s supposed to. This is where the actual testing happens.

QA engineers deploy a mix of automated and manual tests—again, more on that later—to make sure they catch everything, but it’s a lot more hands-on than it might sound. Automated tests are perfect for repetitive user tasks or background processes within the software, but manual tests are the standard for testing more complex scenarios. The goal is simply throwing everything at the software to see what works and what doesn’t. This phase of the process usually starts with unit tests (testing individual parts of the code) and goes all the way to regression tests (making sure the fixes didn’t break anything else).

And frankly, the QA team expects problems to come up. They’re testing the software, not just for functionality, but also for usability, performance, and security. No matter how great your programmers are, bugs are bound to pop up, but that’s the beauty of this iterative process—it’ll keep evolving and getting better.

Step 3: Check

After they’ve tested the software to death, the QA team needs to sit back and analyze what just happened. The “Check” step is about assessing whether the testing actually delivered something useful.

This step is usually done in two phases:

• Auditing. Did the software meet standards? Performing audits makes sure everything is up to par. Here, QA engineers will document issues, and if something’s off, they’ll suggest fixes.
• Measuring the Impact. If they found bugs or made changes, how do these changes affect the overall product? They can’t just fix one thing and call it a day. The team then needs to measure how each tweak will impact the entire software system.

Step 4: Act

Now, it’s either time to start rolling out that shiny new software or go back to the drawing board (or more likely, somewhere in-between). This step is about taking action based on what was learned during the “Check” phase.

If something doesn’t meet the quality standards, the team needs to go back and fix those problems. And they need to document everything—what worked, what didn’t, and the process they followed. This helps future projects from running into the same problems.

QA engineering is—here’s that word again—iterative. That means QA teams aren’t going through the process once, no no. They’ll go back through the cycle, over and over again, improving the software little by little. As bugs get fixed, new ones pop up, and the cycle repeats. It’s a feedback loop that’s focused on continuous improvement.

At the end of the day, QA engineering isn’t just about finding problems and fixing them. It’s about making sure the software delivers what it promises and stays that way—long after it reaches the hands of its users.

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QA Engineering Techniques

QA engineering is all about testing software—it’s quite literally the job. But the techniques they use aren’t exclusive. They’re universal testing techniques, but again, we’re specifically testing software. Like we mentioned above, there are two techniques: automated and manual.

Think of automated testing like setting up a machine that does the heavy lifting for you. You write scripts, set the right tools, and let them run to test the software. While it sounds like you just press a button and walk away, it’s not completely hands-off. Someone has to do the initial setup and make sure the test is performing as expected. Once everything’s in place, these scripts will repeatedly test the software—over and over and over again. Minus the initial setup, the scripts are essentially testing the software on their own, which saves time and makes the process a lot more efficient.

Manual testing is the traditional way of doing things. No scripts, no automation tools—just a QA engineer clicking around, running tests, and documenting any issues that pop up. It’s slower, sure, but it gives a much deeper understanding of how the software behaves (or misbehaves, as the case may be). You’re seeing the product as the user sees it, which means you’re able to pick up on things that might be missed in an automated test.

Within manual testing, there are three methods you need to know about:

• White box testing: For testing the internal workings (design, code, data structures) of the software, from the developer’s point of view.
• Black box testing: For testing what the user sees and interacts with. It focuses on user experience without worrying about how the software is built. You’re testing functionality, not code.
• Gray box testing: As you might have guessed, a hybrid of both white box and black box testing.

Both automated and manual testing have their pros and cons, and you’ll likely end up using both for any given piece of software, but it’s ultimately up to the QA engineer to know when and in what circumstance to use which technique.

What Are the Most Common QA Engineering Tests?

There are also two main types of tests in QA engineering: functional testing and non-functional testing. While functional testing checks what the software does, non-functional testing focuses on how it does it. Let’s break it down with an example.

Take the music streaming app, Spotify. Functional testing is all about making sure that the app does what it’s supposed to do. Can you search for your favorite song? Does the “play” button work when you tap it? Does it save your playlists? Basically, it tests the essential features you use every day—what the app’s supposed to do.

On the other hand, non-functional testing goes into how well the software works. Does it load quickly when you open it? Can it handle one million people streaming at the same time without crashing? How smoothly does it perform when you skip from track to track? Non-functional testing isn’t about whether the feature exists, but whether it works as it should.

Ultimately, functional testing is about testing the actions of the software to answer the “what,” and non-functional testing tests the behavior to answer the “how well.” And there are tons of different QA engineering tests that fall under these two testing types.

Here are some of the most commonly used ones, with examples of how they’d work on an app like Spotify:

Functional Testing

• Unit Testing: This tests individual parts of the software—like a specific function or method—to make sure it works on its own. Example: Testing the function that adds a song to a playlist. The test would check if the song actually appears in the playlist after you click “add to playlist.”
• Integration Testing: This tests how different parts of the software work together. Example: After adding a song to a playlist, does the playlist correctly update in the user’s profile? This test checks if the playlist feature and the user’s profile work well together.
• System Testing: This tests the entire system to make sure everything works together. Example: After a user logs in, can they browse, search, and play music without running into errors or bugs? This tests the whole system’s ability to deliver a smooth experience.
• Smoke Testing: This is a quick check to see if the main features are working. Example: Can you log in, search for songs, and start playing music?
• End-to-End Testing: A bit more comprehensive than smoke testing, this tests the complete user experience from start to finish. Example: Test the process of signing in, searching for a song, adding it to a playlist, and then playing the playlist. Not to be dramatic, but if one part breaks, the entire experience is ruined.
• Regression Testing: This makes sure new updates don’t break existing features. Example: If Spotify adds a new feature to sort playlists, regression testing would make sure this doesn’t break the feature that lets you play music offline.
  • Sanity Testing: A lighter, quicker version of regression testing where you check if specific changes have messed up a core feature or if the software is still mostly working after an update. Example: Say Spotify updates the app’s UI. This would check if the play/pause button still works without diving into all the new UI elements.

Non-Functional Testing

• Performance Testing: This tests how well the software performs under different (normal and stressful) conditions. Example: How long does it take to load a playlist? Does the app lag when searching for songs? If it takes forever, there’s a performance problem.
  • Load Testing: This measures how the software handles a specified number of users or requests. Example: During a new album release, how does Spotify handle thousands of people streaming the same song? Will it freeze or crash?
  • Stress Testing: This tests the app under extreme conditions to see how it breaks and if it recovers. Example: What happens when 10,000 users try to sign in at the same time? Do the playlists still load? Does the app crash? Stress testing finds that breaking point.
  • Accessibility Testing: This makes sure the software is usable by everyone, including people with disabilities. Example: Can the app be fully navigated with a screen reader for visually impaired users?
  • Scalability Testing: This tests the software’s ability to scale—handling increased usage or users. Example: As Spotify expands to more countries or gains more users, does the software still work well or does it slow down when millions of people start streaming at the same time?
• Usability Testing: This checks how easy and intuitive the app is for users. Usability testing checks if you can use the software without wanting to throw your phone at the wall. Example: Can a user find their favorite song easily? Are the features—creating a playlist or sharing music—simple to understand?
• Compatibility Testing: This tests if the app works across different devices, browsers, or operating systems. Example: Does Spotify work on iPhones, Android devices, and different browsers? Are the features consistent across all platforms?
• Security Testing: This checks for vulnerabilities to make sure the app is secure against threats. Testing their cybersecurity makes sure there aren’t any leaks in the system. Example: Can user data, like passwords and payment info, be safely stored without the risk of hackers getting in?

These are just some of the most common functional and non-functional tests, but they represent the core of what QA engineers focus on. And while testing is a huge part of the job, that’s definitely not all there is to it.

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What Does a QA Engineer Do?

So now we know more about the world of QA, but not specifically what a QA engineer does. QA engineer is just one of many titles floating around in the world of quality assurance. You’ll also find positions like software quality engineer, manual QA tester, quality coordinator, software test engineer, or quality system specialist. It depends on the company or industry. But, no matter what the label is, most QA engineers are essentially doing the same thing.

Being a QA engineer means making sure that software is functional and reliable—without bugs, glitches, or crashes. Here’s a quick (and brief) look into what QA engineers do:

• Develop detailed test plans that describe objectives, strategies, and tools
• Collaborate with development teams to understand what needs testing and how to test it
• Create test cases based on software requirements
• Write scripts and build frameworks to automate tests
• Find bugs and document them
• Collaborate with development teams to fix bugs
• Run regression tests to make sure new updates don’t disrupt other features
• Suggest better tools, processes, and criteria for continuous improvement

QA engineers have a job that keeps them in the thick of the development process from start to finish. Whether they’re deep into automation or running manual tests, the end should always be the same—develop reliable software that works and keeps its users happy.

Related: 15 High-Paying Entry-Level Tech Jobs — No Experience Required [2024]

Job Market Outlook for QA Engineering

Fortunately, the job outlook for QA engineers looks pretty solid! The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) predicts a 12% job growth in the field from 2023 to 2033—way faster than the average for most other jobs.

As for where the action is, the top states for QA engineering include the usual suspects: California, Washington, Texas, New York, and Virginia. But if you’re interested in QA engineering and don’t live in one of those hotspots, you’re in luck. Remote work isn’t just a trend, it looks like it’s here to stay in the tech world. And that means you can pretty much work from anywhere. There’s always going to be a demand for quality software, so there’s no shortage of possible opportunities in QA engineering.

How to Learn QA Engineering

The first thing you need to know is that you don’t need a degree to get started, though it can help. Sure, a degree in computer science is nice, but what you really need to focus on is making sure you have the right skills.

Start by familiarizing yourself with a few programming languages, and no, coding isn’t just for full-on developers. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Python are the main ones you’ll want in your toolkit. Python, especially, is going to be your holy grail when it comes to automation.

You’ll also need to learn the tools that are essential to QA engineering—TestRail for organizing test cases and Selenium for automating repetitive tests. And you can’t forget Jira, which is much more than a project management tool. It helps you track bugs, collaborate with your team, and manage the whole testing process.

If you’re ready to get into QA engineering, start working on your skills ASAP. Find a QA engineering bootcamp or online course. And don’t be surprised if you have to take a few different courses (and certifications) to get your skills and knowledge where they need to be.

A great place to start is with Skillcrush’s Break Into Tech Full Stack Track. It’s a beginner-friendly way to learn the basics—HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Python—before you get into the more complex stuff. And when you’re ready for the ins and outs of QA engineering, use our guide on QA engineering bootcamps to help you find a course!