How many times you have to answer the question: What do you do for living? It is not as simple as saying ‘I’m a Quality Software Engineer’, sometimes people don’t know exactly what does it mean and you have to find the correct way to explain them what are your daily activities.
What I’ve realized during these years is that, before answering that question, you have to analyze to whom you are going to explain what you do; and I could identified 3 different group of people:
- people who know about Quality Assurance (QA). e.g. : in a job interview.
- people who have a vague knowledge about it, e.g.: some friends that don’t quit understand yet what you do.
- people who have no clue what it is.
People who know about QA
Like in an interview, whenever you are asked What do you do for living? or What are your daily activities in your job?, you have to answer with, what I like to call, a “formal definition” of what a QA Engineer does. Using the ASQ definition of QA, I came up with the following explanation:
A QA Engineer executes planned and systematic activities implemented in a quality system so that quality requirements for a product or service will be fulfilled. Those activities include:
– develop all the planning processes and procedures in order to try to make sure that the products manufactured or the service delivered by the organization will be of good quality.
– define the standards/methodology to be followed in order to meet the customer requirements. “Fit for purpose”.
– monitor the development process throughout its entire cycle (e.g., performing audits and reviews) comparing the results with the processes and standards defined in the organization, making sure you are doing the right things, the right way, the first time (e.g.: Are requirements being defined at the proper level of detail?). Their activities have a Failure Prevention focus.
For a Software QA Engineer, you just have to replace the word product with software and maybe be more specific about which standards your company uses: “A SQAE is a person who perform all the planned and systematic activities implemented in a quality system throughout the life cycle of a software, so that quality requirements for the software will be fulfilled. Monitoring the activities and ensuring conformance to the standard ISO 9001 or CMMI”.
People who have a vague knowledge about it
With these group of people, sometimes I face another challenging, because after I use the formal definition, their use to say: OH! I see, you do testing OR OH, you do quality control (QC). And then the explanation has to be extended.
Testing is the part of QC and QC is part of QA. A QC Engineer focuses on the product, identifying errors or flaws in products (e.g., bugs in software) and testing the end products at specified intervals, to ensure that the products or services meet the requirements defined during the earlier process for QA. Their activities have a Failure Detection focus.
To read more about the difference between QA and QC click here.
People who have no clue
For this group of people, I try to explain to them my profession as if I am working in a bakery. Let’s think this scenario: You go to a bakery to require a cake for your birthday. Your cake has specific characteristics/requirements: taste, flavor, texture, color, theme, for how many people, when do you need it, if you want it to be delivered or you are going to pick it up, just to name a few.
So a QA Engineer is a person who works in the bakery and make sure that every single of your requirements for your cake are met: you get the cake as you want, when you want. Some examples of the duties are:
– make sure the baker is trained in his duties,
– make sure the baker have followed the written recipe (documented process) for making the cake. Assure that the recipe is stored in a controlled place so that no one can change it,
– make sure they use the correct ingredients as the recipe and your requirements specify,
– make sure all the tools are in the correct place and available to be used,
– make sure that if any problem occur, it has to be documented and reported as the process developed by QA specifies,
– make sure every feedback received from customers is managed and work on any change (recipe or ingredients) needed.
