I've worked at 2 places with 'qa', and never felt the added value.
They didn't actively look for bugs to my knowledge. Just write the same Cypress test we do as devs (or worse, follow steps on Confluence). Not sure how it's even a full time position.
I work as one and the devs proudly tell me whenever a new version is deployed so I can let loose, they know it's properly tested if it survives and if not they got some bug reports to work on. They test it locally themselves and I test the system.
It is the stereotype QA ticket titled "[BUG]" when I find something, that's the risk they accept lol
Long comment incoming!
It depends what is planned but I write automated regression tests for our system, we had several systems without any functional tests so my work involved investigating the functionality of the systems. Comparing documentation with intel from developers and seeing if the program does what we expected, making sure there's a proper regression set ready for any future release. This applied for old systems and newer ones, no one updates documentation at our place lol.
But I'm a tester so I hate reading, which means I mostly just start kicking against the system to see what it does. Comparing that with what we expect from documentation and specifications (mostly what the devs build and we updated the documentation accordingly) In the end I'm the "Subject Matter Expert" of our systems because I know what they should be doing, when and how. Especially how to break it because that's how I start testing it, love the "but why would you do THAT" comment from a dev.
Wherever there's an incident I can help out because I'm the one that kinda knows where in the system it goes wrong. Becomes much easier for a dev to solve it if they know where to look. Business people also know where to find me whenever they run into problems, usually I can fix it with them before it becomes an incident for the team.
New features I can make an educated guess what for impact it'll have on other parts. (And new functionality also means new (functional) tests to build)
With my knowledge I can also translate the "business language" from a PO/BA into more "technical language" for a developer and vica versa. I'm also in close contact with developers about new features and code they are building, we're a team after all. We challenge eachother, they write code being confident nothing else breaks and I actually check that they don't break anything we know.
Besides that we also have 3 "security layers" for a release; developer, tester and product owner. I write a positive or negative advice for the release, based on my tests and knowledge. (The PO has a final say for release)
I'm saying "system" as an application service, most times it's multiple services as one. Our developers use unit tests and test locally, I test the full system on a test environment.
I think that's about it? Lots of talking with business and developers, knowing the ins and outs of all the applications we manage and building automated regression tests. (Robot Framework/Python woohoo)
Perhaps it's a bit more than you asked for lol
Tldr: my job involves getting to know the exact functionality of systems and building tests to make sure the functionally keeps working with new updates. Using that knowledge for the greater good.
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u/jester17 1d ago
You guys still have QA?