Is “Quality Engineer” the most accurate title for today's testing roles?

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Check out our latest article by @stuthomas, “Quality Engineer: What’s in a Job Title?” and explore how a quality engineering approach enables teams to solve complex problems, improve processes across the SDLC, and enhance the experience for everyone involved with the product.

From redefining roles to adopting a holistic approach to quality, Stuart explains why “Quality Engineer” is the most accurate title for those specializing in quality and testing.

What you’ll learn:

  • :mag: The differences between roles like tester, QA, SDET, and quality coach, and what each contributes.
  • :star2: How quality engineers combine traits from multiple roles to enable teams and ensure quality across the SDLC.
  • :arrows_counterclockwise: How iterative improvements and a shift-left approach empower quality teams to focus on learning, exploration, and process improvements.
  • :bulb: Real examples of how quality engineers add value beyond testing, from improving incident management to setting up ephemeral test environments.

After reading, share your thoughts:

  • Do you think “Quality Engineer” is the most accurate title for this role? Why or why not?
  • How does your role or team align with the concept of quality engineering?
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Apologies for link spamming, but I happen to have an entire article about job titles written already: Which job title I prefer?
I’ll just quote the closing paragraph:

It’s easy to get lost in discussion about job titles. There are multiple definitions floating around and people acting as if their definition was the only “true” one. At the end of the day, it might be good idea to take a step back and acknowledge that often this is not the most important issue at hand. I am committed to excel at the craft of testing, and this goal will remain unchanged whether my contract spells “quality engineer”, “software developer in test” or “tester”.

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I guess I would want to make sure that this is not devaluing the word ‘Engineer’, which tends to involve qualifications and exacting standards. We test things at the end of the day and whilst a difficult profession, I don’t see much crossover with other branches of engineering, even Software Engineer. I would worry that inventing fancy job titles seems like navel-gazing and leads to further confusion amongst recruiters. That’s my hot take!

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The main problem with ‘Quality’ is, in Belgium… , that it’s also used in the food industry and when you would search for quality assurance jobs, you’ll get food stuff XD

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This bit is really important.

Quick caveat: this article is simply my opinion and perception of what a person with the given job titles are likely to do day to day. I realise this will vary greatly between organisations.

A good article though.

Its a shame though that for many the view of the term tester has been diminished to an absolute basic level of responsibility. Its really hard to get my head around the idea that their are people doing testing without leveraging from tools for example.

However the reality is a lot of testers are not involved to the level of the activities of the examples in the article so it presents good ideas of what a tester could be doing.

That level though at its core is a tester for me though, there are a lot of people with the tester title do pretty much the role described here as being something different with a new name. I’ve seen the same things over the years with renaming testers to be Quality Assurance, Quality assistance, Quality advocate etc yet its the exact same activities as a lot of those with Software tester title.

The challenge remains that not all testers are equal.

So did we make up new titles often at the same time minimising the core testing title to be somehow lesser, this is the part I’m uncomfortable with.

Perhaps we are becoming psychologists looking to influence the perception and value of the role we do by using new titles.

I don’t have the answer to the basic idea of not all “testers are equal” but perhaps it is in explaining the model of development and testing used rather the title.

The article does this fairly and I like the ideas around holistic approaches, it could have been about the role of a tester in different models and how their activities and contribution can vary from other models.

Title change may be a simplistic way of doing that but when I consider the harm the switch to QA title did alongside its often attempts to diminish the core testing title which often does much more I remain wary of the broad sweep change in titles.

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Now oddly I’m completely against the “manual” element in a testing title, it thankfully was not used in the article but now its got me thinking “how can I be so against that but then less so in favour of changes the core tester title”.

Perhaps there is merit in a fresh start title and perhaps its my experience of seeing it before done wrong that makes me wary. I need to think about this a bit more.

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Firstly, thanks for all the engagement! Not used to getting so many comments on my articles :grin: I won’t reply to you all individually but will try and cover some of the themes.

I totally get why some people might feel job titles can be some what irrelevant. Though I like to think they can be a sign of intent from leadership when they are done well and with thought - ideally with some kind of career framework to support that intent.

I’m not sure I agree that for the role I described that using the word ‘Engineer’ is devaluing it. I see a lot of crossover with other technology engineering roles - I have even written previously about the cross-over between Quality Engineering and Platform Engineering. But if the coding and development activities I described aren’t engineering, is there a better word we could use to describe those activities?

@kristof maybe Test Engineer would work better in your situation?

Perhaps we are becoming psychologists looking to influence the perception and value of the role we do by using new titles.

I think this is definitely part of it. We see this in many aspects of the working environment, across job roles in many different disciplines and profession.

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It’s more for Belgium than for me XD I think it’s because HR looks up what are the most hits on recruitment platforms but they don’t think about the Quality in the food industry, that’s why they pick Quality as a term because it has more hits

I always call myself a " Technical QA Engineer" because it’s so much more then just test automation but my own current job title is cyber security researcher :stuck_out_tongue:

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I was talking about this very topic today with some other testers and I think that titles contain the following:

  • What a company chooses to call us.
  • How we self identify in our own head.
  • How we explain our skill set to others.

And these things may differ or align or even change based on context.

Our job titles are frequently just given to us by an organisation, so usually we don’t have control there. Instead we control how we identify and describe ourselves to others in what we do.

A lot of titles comments we see usually ends up with trying to standardise. But that means then forcing an identity on to people that they might not resonate with. We want standards to help the market understand what we do, as an easy way of branding our skill set and how we can help others… but are there other ways to do this?

So for example for me:

  • My title is staff quality engineer.
  • I identify in my own head as an agile manual tester.
  • I describe myself to others as someone who can coach quality and testing throughout the lifecycle and stack, using automation and exploratory testing techniques.

All of these three things are really different from each other. And my title and explanation of what I do I can hold loosely and change but how I self identify I hold strongly. It’s why I dislike having titles pushed onto me or how I identify erased. I guess it’s close to being in the LGBTQIA+ community. You want to be visible and seen for how you identify, not erased.

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In agile if quality is everyone’s responsibility then everyone is a quality engineer, however,I believe rather than looking for the title we should focus on what that job title is offering us to do at the organization, offering us to learn through challenges.

Also, it might be possible that different companies may have different job titles but they offer the same job role. For e.g. Test automation engineer in Company ABC and SDET in Company XYZ may have the same role of writing scripts and reviewing the scripts of Peers.

That’s one example but if we look around we will find plenty of examples where the job title may not properly align with the job role.

So when we talk about quality engineering I believe we should look into how our job role fits into quality engineering and enhancing the quality of the product rather than the job title.

That’s why it is important to carefully review each point of job role while switching position or company.

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They wanted everything out of me so they put my title as QA Software Tester

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I struggle to agree with the use of the term “quality engineer” for testers. It feels like an attempt to replace the “tester” title without fully recognising the role’s unique strengths. Most responsibilities I see mentioned for quality engineers testers do and engineers do.

Many roles contribute to the quality of a product, assigning the term “quality engineer” to a single role oversimplifies this collaboration.

Testers have influential power because of our ability to gather knowledge across domains, not necessarily because we are experts in coding, design, or infrastructure. The title “test engineer” reflects this balance well: we are engineers with a focus on testing, and we contribute to quality by questioning things, learning, sharing our learnings, challenging things etc long list.

Testing is our specialty, and I feel it should remain a recognised discipline rather than being folded into a broad, vague label like “quality engineer.”

Quality is a shared responsibility, encompassing development, design, infrastructure, and other areas. The term “quality engineer” implies that one group is singularly responsible for ensuring quality, which is misleading. It diminishes the collaborative nature of achieving quality in software development. Feels the same as the term quality assurance where we assigned a title to something we don’t have the decision power for.

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First I thought, no - can’t be, but then I searched in a search engine and true. :smiley:

Clarebout Potatoes :potato:

And now I am hungry.

Thanks @kristof :wink:

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hahaha yea :stuck_out_tongue: Sometimes the vacancies are sooo vage you can’t even tell if it’s for software testing or for food haha

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That’s a great article @stuthomas, thanks!

Your definition of QE is fairly close to what we had at Cazoo, with the caveat that the day-to-day work depended a bit on the skills and interests of the QE and the needs and maturity of the team, and organisation.

To @sarahdeery’s question about whether this is the most accurate title for today’s testing roles, I’m not sure. As described in the article, I think a tester role/function and a QE are two different things. And I think there is a need, or use, for both, depending on the organisation.
However, it seems to me a lot of orgs are moving away from having Testers, and the roles named “Quality Engineer” is on the rise. So from that perspective, perhaps the language is changing, and it is the more accurate title?
But then again, looking at many of those QE roles on the market today, they seem to be just rebranded “Test Automation Engineers” (to follow the namings in the article) rather than “Tester” roles, which indicates orgs are just wanting to sound hip and modern rather than actually changing to a culture of Quality Engineering.

When I started looking for jobs again this summer, I had been working as a QE (-ish, we didn’t call it that at eBay) for about a decade. Starting to read through all the job ads on LinkedIn, I was at first pleasantly surprised that so many organisations were embracing Quality Engineering. I mean, as mentioned, I had already worked like this for ten years, so it shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise that it was catching on elsewhere as well.
Except… with very few exceptions, they were all orgs that were looking for a small army of test automation minions (preferably thriving in silos judging by the wording in the JDs), or someone to manage said army. Bummer! :disappointed:

So, it’s great to see that there are some orgs that actually do QEing like what I’m looking for. It brings me hope. But, I think there should still be room for Tester roles out there as well, because I’m absolutely convinced they are needed.

Note: I was about to make a cheap point about Crowdstrike being one org that could have used a few more testers, but seeing that their share price is pretty much back up where it was before the incident… I guess nobody really cares?

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