How much do you agree with this statement?
To become a Quality Engineer, you must first become a software tester
- Agree
- Somewhat agree
- Somewhat disagree
- Disagree
Bonus points for added community commentary
How much do you agree with this statement?
To become a Quality Engineer, you must first become a software tester
Bonus points for added community commentary
Software testing is a part of quality engineering, but quality engineering is a broader process that includes more than just testing. If you test your own code or someone else’s - at any level - you are software testing. It does not mean you have to have had the title “software tester”. We of course know that Quality Engineering is a strategic approach that includes activities like requirements gathering/discovery, risk storming, design sparring, development (which includes testing). Unsure how you would be able to become a Quality Engineer and skip the testing part of the skills and experience.
I’ve somewhat agreed with this as I feel testing fundamentals are an absolute must to be a quality engineer. That said I feel you can learn the fundamentals without everything else that a software tester needs to know.
Starting as a software tester can be helpful, but it’s not the only path to becoming a Quality Engineer. Diverse backgrounds, including development or DevOps, can also lead to this role, as long as there’s a strong focus on quality and process improvement.
As I have seen at most workplaces, quality engineers in the IT Industry do the same tasks that software testers do.
Titles like quality engineer hold more significance in industries like manufacturing, FMCG, etc. In the software industry even though many people hold titles like software tester, quality engineer, SDET, etc. at the end of the day they are testing software manually or automation or both and hence contributing to the quality of the product.
One reason is that there is a very rare chance that in an organization there will be quality engineers as well as software testers also. So if the organization has someone who holds the title of quality engineer there, then they have to primarily do the task of software testing. And so either you are a software tester or a quality engineer somewhere the words are different but the task done by you is same i.e. writing test cases, scripts , test the functionality manually ,etc.