SDETs are Devs and Testers, so what is a QE?

Discussions
, ,
1

Software Development Engineer in Test, aka SDET. It’s a role that demands both development skills and testing skills, with a focus on test automation.

Test Engineer is another title that might also be a Tester with a focus on automation, although not always. Same for QA Engineer.

Engineer in this context often, but not always, implies the use of code as part of the role.

So what is a Quality Engineer, and why is it different from other roles that imply skills in testing, quality assurance and development?

Sometimes, not much. Some companies use these names fairly interchangeably, and often the same people with the same range of skills could excel is each of these roles. More over, depending on the company, team, and even the individual, each role can look quite different in reality.

Some key characteristics you might find as part of Quality Engineer as a role, or quality engineering as a concept, is the focus on the bigger picture, strategy, education and coaching, process improvements and technical leadership. Any of the above roles can have elements od technical leadership, but I’d expect I to be less unexpected, and more explicit for a QE. I’d expect a QE to have a broader remit, over a wider portion of the SDLC.

OK, I’ve used a lot of qualifiers there, because there is nuance. And note, many could rightfully argue that Quality Engineering is not a role, but a way of working, much like DevOps. Much like DevOps spawns Dev Ops Engineers, Quality Engineering spawns QEs, because depending on organisational and team maturity and capacity, you absolutely need, or can hugely benefit from, a specialist.

I also don’t assume all Quality Engineers will have worked as Testers or QAs, I think some of them maybe come from an Ops, DevOps, Dev, Infra, or varied background. Just like many developers and testers themselves come from diverse backgrounds and prior experience.

What are your thoughts? I’d love to know.

Oh and if this topic interests you, checkout the Testing Planet Episode 8 on Quality Engineering.

6 Likes
2

The problem with QE is trying to portray itself as the new shiny.

The big question is whether you need a deep understanding of testing as QE. To me, testing is still a bulk of work and a key skill. QE tends to devalue testing, in order to promote itself.

3 Likes
3

Yep it’s nuanced.

SDET was a toolsmith for me. A great coder building tools and frameworks that testers could leverage from.

That sort of drifted into automation engineer over time, building frameworks and scripting automation and potentially lost some of that initial broader toolsmith value.

Engineer, guess that still implies builder of things to me - automation engineer if focused on automation, maybe test engineer if also doing a decent amount of test design and testing. Note they for me still tended to have a bias for known risks and scripted testing. Coding skill levels seemed to drop a bit from SDET who was an actual developer.

Quality engineer, some of testers did broaden more into devops activities, CI pipelines, system admin activities but retain their core tester activities. Maybe quality engineer still fits.

Most testers themselves these days have technical skills and can usually do automation even if its not their main focus. Highly technical risk focused testers but in our case have a bias towards the unknowns and broader risk coverage than perhaps the test engineer or SDET roles above.

We also use quality consultant term at times, that’s bigger picture whole team quality planning and activities, coaching in addition to testing.

Some of these I just see as different hats I’d wear depending on needs, I have a strong preference personally to be wearing the tester hat as much as possible.

Our ratio’s are about 1 to 15 though and in the small team between us we can cover all of the above specialisations but just not as a single specialised role that defines our job and what we do.

2 Likes
4

João Proença gave a talk related to “quality engineer” term at Agile Testing Days USA 2023. I have in my notes from that: " Everything we do to deliver software that is useful, good and correct can be considered testing. We need facilitation skills, ability to get team and business buy-in, and work with other specialists such as architecture. The term ‘quality engineering’ may capture this better." That led me to use this term more. Apart from the debate whether anyone in software is really an engineer, I think it’s a term whose meaning we can agree on.

6 Likes
5

Sometime i feel like SDET is Asia and Tester is Europe, both are combined to form Eurasia in the form of QE. :smiley:

4 Likes
6

Hmm but all the characteristics mentioned for QE were already being done by Test managers, Leads, Senior testers. Experienced testers tend to take a step back and look at the bigger picture, leadership, coaching etc ?

I’m not sure what’s unique or new about QE though.

With SDET key difference for me is they can also write application code and deliver features if needed but thats not their core role. Some of the good SDETs I know get paid more than devs

7

I’ll be honest, the only SDETs I’ve met don’t care about quality. They automate what they are given and that’s it. They don’t care if it’s up to coding standards. They don’t care if the test itself is up to any testing standards. If something in the app doesn’t match the test exactly, they’re more likely to use a hammer to make it fit into a box or ask someone else what to do.

Maybe I’ve just been unlucky, though

8

Quality is more than verification of requirements.

SDETs are folk who are skilled in software development practices and use those to verify the application is meeting requirements.

To me QEs are taking a wider view to ensure that we’re shipping quality, where to me quality includes the 3 pillars of quality outlined by Dan Ashby; value, excellence and correctness.

SDET is more “technical” whilst QE is broader.

IMO at least.

1 Like
9

SDET, QA, Test Engineer, QE… sometimes it feels like we need a testing glossary just to understand our own job titles.

From my experience, the title might change, but the heart of the role usually doesn’t, we care about building confidence in the product and helping the team catch risks before users do.

1 Like
10

We have some of these terms now in the MoT glossary, and we could add more.

We have Quality Engineering, although not QE as a job role.

And, we have a gap for SDET for sure.