The Role of a QA Engineer in the Tech Development Team

Many people think that you need a tester is only at the release stage, but competent development teams integrate a tester at every stage of software development. Let’s talk about the role of QA (Quality Assurance) in the development team. Let’s analyze how well you can do without a tester?

Why does your team need a professional tester?

1. Knows all the ins and outs of your website. A tester is well versed in software and tasks associated with development.
2. The tester knows within what task, what exactly was implemented and when, they can help the developer find a connection with the necessary old revisions.
3. Tests all the little things before releasing a new function. When developers test, they only test the successful scenario. And this is natural: they do not want to break their own system but want to confirm that everything works as programmed. The developer, most likely, will not catch the bugs in their own system.
4. If the tester is present from the very beginning, the development will go faster. You may not know the big picture of the project. QAs tend to be curious and want to know what each button does. If you involve testers early on, they will find bugs, incompletely implemented or forgotten requirements, or inconsistencies in requirements.

Why does your team NOT need a tester?

The tester can be a time-consuming burden. Sometimes we just do not want to wait for QA to conduct their tests, because the release is coming out today. If deadlines are tight, and the development product is simple, you can take a chance and release it without additional verification. But you must be prepared for clients and users to point out bugs to you.

If you have a very small team or a startup. Of course, quality is good, but sometimes speed is better. Especially in the early stages of the MVP release. Clients won’t mind a couple of mistakes as long as you offer them new value. If your projects are mostly simple product landing pages or one-page websites on a constructor, then most likely you can save money on a tester for now.

Summing up, the larger the project, the more it needs a full-fledged team of testers.