Most Important Soft Skills for Quality Assurance Engineer

How to get into IT without work experience through software testing? You need motivation, certain knowledge, and skills. To become a successful QA engineer, you need to master a set of skills that are divided into two groups: hard skills and soft skills.

Hard skills are the skills that QA engineers use to solve day-to-day tasks, be it finding and reporting bugs or writing test documentation. Such skills, by the way, can be easily mastered together with SPINCAREER Academy in our courses for testers.

What are soft skills and what role do they play for QA engineers? Let’s find out.

Why Are Soft Skills So Important?

Soft skills include abilities that are not directly related to the performance of professional duties but are an essential condition for quick immersion in the job and effective communication with colleagues and the customer.

In the field of IT, most of the products are created or undergo a quality assessment by teams of specialists.

Therefore, the success of the work depends on whether employees can communicate with each other, express their thoughts logically and be responsible for every decision they make.

What qualities should a tester have? Let’s figure it out.

Soft Skills of QA Engineers

To pass an interview for the position of a QA engineer, beginners need to remember such skills as:

Competent Wording of Questions

It is quite natural that at first the testers who have come to the project have difficulties understanding the requirements or the logic of some product functionality.

In this case, it is important to clarify all the misunderstood aspects, whether it is the meaning of unknown technical terms or the question clarifying which category (according to the scale of severity or priority) should be assigned to the found defects.

If there is any problem, but you cannot solve it on your own, be sure to find out which of the employees can help and what information you need to give them.

Always remember to ask any question politely, clarifying the information that you have found on your own, as well as the necessary details so that the problem is clear without additional explanations.

Correct Description of Found Defects

When reviewing logged errors, the developer should immediately understand what the problem is and where it is localized. Therefore, it is important that the QA engineer correctly reflects the atypical behavior of the software product.

Basic information includes a title to the found error, a description of the location of its localization, the sequence of actions for reproduction, and the expected system behavior.

To avoid ambiguity, it is recommended to attach screenshots, videos, or any other information to the description that will help to determine exactly which part of the code contains the defect.

Ranking Errors by Severity

A beginner specialist needs to know the criteria for the gradation of the errors found according to the degree of severity. Of course, they can be very different on different projects.

However, the main thing is to first understand the fundamental differences between blockers and minor errors, and then figure out the peculiarities of ranking on the current project.

The lack of such a skill can complicate the work of both the QA engineer and their team as the engineer would have to constantly ask the team for an answer even in obvious cases.

Ability to Create Simple Test Cases

Why is it so important to write test cases in clear language? Firstly, in this way, you will be able to quickly navigate the work done.

Secondly, due to the long-term nature of many IT projects (sometimes decades), testing teams can be completely updated from time to time.

So simple and logically written test documentation will help beginners quickly get up to speed and become a part of the team.

Natural Curiosity

The testers clearly did not invented the expression “curiosity killed the cat”. A good QA engineer will always ask questions like “What else can I do to break the system?” or “What happens if I …?”

The more questions you ask yourself about what other tests to carry out to improve the quality of the product, the more likely you are to find hidden and critical defects hard to reproduce.

Discipline and Responsible Approach to Work

This skill will always be a priority when ensuring the quality of any software product.

All testing on the project must be completed on time, and you must notify your manager or more experienced colleagues about the occurrence of force majeure circumstances.

These qualities are especially important on projects using agile development methodologies, where all the work is done in stages, and the time for completing each sprint is pre-agreed and cannot be changed.

Final Words

Soft skills will help any QA engineer – whether you’re a newbie or an experienced tester: to handle tasks efficiently, easily communicate with co-workers, and deliver high-quality products to customers.

And QA courses from the SPINCAREER Academy, in turn, will contribute to the achievement of the set goals and the successful start of a tester’s career. So go for it!