| Skills | QA Junior </br> (With the support of the QA Coach) |
QA Junior Advance </br> (Being quite independent and with a little support from the QA Coach) |
QA Semi-Senior </br> (Without the help of the QA Coach) |
QA semi-senior advance </br> (Be independent and escalate issues to the QA Manager) |
QA Senior </br>(Be an example to follow and help the Juniors grow) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Soft Skills | |||||
| Mindset | - Have basic knowledge of QA, Test Strategies, test types. </br> - Knowing what and how to test each functionality. </br> - Made your notes, discuss them with your QA Coach to help you with your next steps. </br> - Should take initiative, be self-motivated, and constantly seek opportunities to improve the testing process. |
- Meticulous attention to details </br> - Prevent software defects, reducing overall costs and enhancing customer satisfaction </br> - Identifying potential issues early on </br> - Work effectively in a team and adapt to changing circumstances </br> - Be flexible, adaptable, and able to work well under pressure to meet project deadlines. </br> - Being proactive helps them stay ahead of potential issues and deliver high-quality software. |
- Empowering everyone in software development to participate in quality assurance. </br> - Encourages data-driven testing empowers software testers to shift testing to the left </br> -Enabling continuous testing in a culture of quality </br> - Being proactive, anticipating opportunities for systems, service or product improvement or development and taking appropriate action(s). |
- Can get into the mindset and understand how developers, product owners and users view the product. </br> - You are able to combine the two worlds of testing and development, you will be able to reach a culture where everyone cares and works together towards achieving one common goal. </br> - Break the paradigm of developers only focusing on development and QA only on testing. |
- You keep organisational objectives and strategies in mind, and ensure courses of action are aligned with the strategic context. </br> - Understands how software development works outside of just their QA role. </br> - You will have to deal with very tight deadlines, repetitive tasks, and perhaps the occasional difficult colleague. So, learning how to stay positive and stress free in each situation |
| Analytical | - Analyze and understand the requirements that are prioritized in a prioritized sprint </br> - Identify the necessary tests that must be performed to ensure the quality of the version to be delivered. </br> - Help the developer understand the business value they need to deliver in their tests </br> - Identify and applying specific quality standards to tasks undertaken to ensure that deliverables are accurate and complete. |
- Apply critical thinking to every development task, whether it is a technical concern, design remarks or comments on the user experience. </br> - Testing the scenarios that a regular user encounters rather than focusing on individual requirements. |
- Tests to break to find flaws so they don’t make it farther into development. </br> - Cares about quality. Doesn’t just want things to work, wants them to work well. </br> - Nonconventional thinking helps test the usability of an application and hammer out all use cases. </br> - Ask questions and raise risks and concerns |
- You can understand the needs, objectives and constraints of those in other products and functions. </br> - Try to challenge, explore and investigate rather than validate and checking. Does this feature work for our users? </br> - Knows what’s important and what’s not. Sometimes you need to decide what you are going to test next based on priority or business need. |
- You understand business considerations and ensure alignment with them when making decisions or recommending actions. </br> - You understand the needs of the internal or external customer and keep these in mind when taking actions or making decisions. </br> - You’ll be familiar with techniques for analysing and re-designing business processes which have been modelled. </br> - You will often have to break down complex problems into much smaller units, so you can analyze each element, and come up with the best possible solution. |
| Comunication | - You should communicate effectively with the different members of your Squad/product/domain. </br> - You should share quality metrics effectively and moderate the language depending on the target audience you are addressing. </br> - Be proactive and take notes from the requirements gathering sessions or relevant sessions with the business, and then facilitate the adoption of sending Minutes notes to keep track of and monitor what was agreed upon in the sessions. |
- You will be effective at communicating with stakeholders in writing, such as through report writing and via email. </br> - Effectively communicating any issues or concerns and collaborating on finding solutions. |
- Identify impacts on other systems and/or products and communicate with your counterparts to establish a joint testing procedure. </br> - Effective, approachable and sensitive communicator in different communities and cultures. </br> - Having empathy and an understanding of the end-user’s mindset is critical for a product’s success. Think about it, if you test a product for quality, but fail to think of the end-user and what they want, then you have tested and signed off on a product that is not wanted or needed by the end-user. |
Be a Great communicator. </br> - Clear and concise when reporting on issues. </br> - Able to judge audience (developers, project managers, product owners, etc.) and adjust communication as needed. </br> - Cognizant that QA testing is a team game and the ultimate success is team success. </br> - Doesn’t play the blame game and understands that everyone makes mistakes. </br> - Learn from pass experience: So when you move from one project to another, you can take your past experience and apply what you learnt to a new project. There will often be similarities across projects, so you can utilise what you have learnt to solve problems in other projects. |
Be an Excellent comunicator </br> - Know what questions actually need to be asked, and when they need to be asked. </br> - Knows how to get a discussion back on track </br> - Lead discussions and Meetings |
| Problem Resolution | You analyze the problem and help you think of solutions that, if necessary, you will need to scalate in the correct way. | Need to think critically, analyze complex problems, and propose effective strategies to resolve them. | - Sees/pinpoints where the issue happened, often without help of your QA Coach. </br> - Thinks on their feet to create solutions if Plan B or C doesn’t work. |
You can make decisions at the appropriate time, taking into account the needs of the situation, priorities, constraints, known risks, and the availability of necessary information and resources. | - Gets to the heart of a problem and knows what questions to ask, so the team knows exactly what to do. </br> - Not all problems are difficult to resolve, but there will be times when you need to think more in depth to find a solution to a hard problem. </br> - Have a good decision making process in place to ensure that you don’t take too much time to make a final decision. </br> - You’ll be proficient in methods and techniques for the assessment and management of business risk including safety-related risk. |
| Time Management & Organization | - You will need to understand the project goals and milestones and the defined timelines for completing them. </br> - You will need to identify the tasks that are required from the QA side to complete the tasks on time. </br> - Determine what is in scope and what is out of scope, in order to communicate the scope of QA to stakeholders. |
Effective time management and tackle project deadlines without compromising quality. | - Effectively identify all the testing tasks required for a given sprint </br> - Knowing how to prioritize which tasks are more important than others in order to meet and comply with the team’s deadline </br> - Effectively track and escalate issues to ensure timelines are met |
You can determine a course of action by breaking it down into smaller steps and by planning and resourcing each of these, making allowance for potential problems and escalating if necessary. | - Knowing how to effectively estimate, prioritize and plan all testing activities, both your own and those of your colleagues, avoiding stressful situations for you and your team in the long term. |
| Collaboration, Knowleadge Sharing & Team Work | You must collaborate with your Squad members | - Work closely with developers and other team members </br> - Ability to work well in a team with the goal of fostering a collaborative and productive work environment. |
- Establishing relationships, contributing to an open culture and maintaining contacts with people from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines. </br> - Ability to adapt style and approach to meet the needs of different audiences. |
- Sharing your knowledge and past experiences with other members of your team </br> - Encourage those who are new to the team that the team is a collaborative and friendly team, who just want to help each other and ensure a product is of the highest quality. |
You will need to be able to help and train other colleagues in a more junior role, taking on the role of QA Coach for them. |
| Technical Skills | |||||
| QA Strategy & QA Governance Framework | - Know the established QA procedure </br> - Must ensure that the QA procedure is followed by all Squad members. </br> - With the help of the QA Coach be aligned with any changes that occur in the strategy and facilitate its adoption by the Squad |
- Ensure that all squad members follow established procedures and escalate any non-compliance to take corrective action </br> - Proactively identify improvements in the QA process and share your feedback with the QA Coach </br> - Proactively, be aware of any changes that occur in the strategy and that must be applied to the Squad |
- Improves process by finding better ways to do things and communicate to the QA Manager to implement </br> - Independently, share with the QA Manager the corrective actions necessary to ensure that the procedure is followed in the Squad </br> - Foster the adoption of QA culture and Agile culture in the Squad |
You must monitor and facilitate the implementation of improvements deemed appropriate with the guidance of the QA Manager. | - You will need to establish a detailed roadmap of the improvements to be implemented, share it with the QA manager, facilitate its approval and roll out the initiatives in your squad. </br> - Regularly share status and help other squads implement identified improvements. </br> - The quality status of the process will be reported autonomously and independently to the QA Manager. |
| Swe Tools | - You must know what are the official tools established by Swe </br> - Make sure that only those are used in the squads to which you are assigned. |
- You must know the basic operation of the tools established by Swe, in order to help the rest of the team in their use. </br> - Proficiency in test automation frameworks, familiarity with programming languages, knowledge of databases, and expertise in using testing tools. |
- You will be familiar with software automate tools or assist in any part of the testing process during all or part of the testing lifecycle. Examples include, but are not limited to: debugging tools, monitoring tools, and load testing tools. </br> - Can read and write code to fully understand automation scripting. </br> - It should help, facilitate the correct use of QA tools, promote good practices, provide support and resolve technical queries raised by development team when coding automatic tests Scripts. |
- Analyze, conduct laboratories and propose new QA tools that facilitate and improve product quality </br> - Facilitate the adoption of the new proposed tools |
- Analyze, conduct laboratories and propose new QA tools that facilitate and improve product quality </br> - Help, support and guide other colleagues in the creation and analysis of new tool laboratories </br> - Create an effective and realistic roadmap for deploying the proposed new tools to facilitate their approval and roll out </br> - Facilitate the adoption of the new proposed tools |
| Requirements/Documentation | - You will need to understand the prioritized business requirements, which will be implemented in the sprint </br> - You should help create good user stories, making them understandable by any member of the team and facilitating their implementation. </br> - You must understand the business and know the functionalities of each application, as well as how it is expected to work. </br> - It should help define the acceptance criteria by identifying validations that have not been covered. </br> - You will need to run an analysis of all stories in the sprint on the first day of the sprint to verify that standards are met and that they are correctly defined to be implemented. |
- You should proactively analyze and understand any existing product documentation, as well as propose improvements to facilitate its understanding and updating. </br> - You should be able to identify unclear parts of the stories, as well as facilitate the creation of acceptance criteria that cover the functionality using the principles (Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, Testable) </br> - It must identify gaps in requirements and/or documentation and facilitate the adoption of good practices. |
- You need to have ownership that all stories have the information needed to be built, as well as provide feedback on how to improve the stories. </br> - Proactively, before the sprint starts, you should review and help ensure that stories are complete and follow the principles of (Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, Testable). If any of them is incomplete, you should request that they be deprioritized or ensure that the information is completed before the sprint starts. </br> - You will need to participate in requirements gathering meetings with the business, to understand what is being asked for and help ensure that the stories are clear and cover all business needs. |
- You will need to identify missing acceptance criteria, from the end-user perspective, to facilitate their validation. </br> - Proactively, you should ask the appropriate questions, moderating the language according to the interlocutor, in the business requirements gathering sessions, with the aim of identifying overlooked requirements and improving the how to demo. |
- Know what questions actually need to be asked, and when they need to be asked in order to identify the requirements need to be implemented and support POTech </br> - You will need to support other QA members with less skills and facilitate the skill increase of junior profiles. |
| Test design & maintenance | - You will be responsible for creating and maintaining the application’s functionality map in the selected QA tool. </br> - You will need to create reusable test cases by identifying the functionalities to be tested from requirements documents and/or the stories prioritized in the sprint. </br> - With the coach’s guidance, you will need to create complex cases, identifying the roles and processes necessary to meet the requirements. |
- You must be able to create and maintain complex, reusable test cases from the stories of a given sprint </br> - You will need to understand complex functionalities, know how to ask the necessary questions to identify how the application is expected to work </br> - You will identify the best techniques and methods needed to cover the functionalities with tests. |
- QA best practices and data-driven testing into the end-to-end customer experience, driving organizational growth </br> - You should be able to reuse already defined test cases, adjust them based on the impacts of developments on functionalities and maintain them. </br> - You should be able to identify functionalities that impact other systems and/or products and coordinate the planning and execution of tests. </br> - Must ensure and be familiar with the good practices and standards defined to facilitate and improve the creation and maintenance of test cases. |
- You must be able to identify the functionalities that are impacted by a development and anticipate their adjustment with the actors involved, development, automation team, etc. </br> - You should be able to identify complex business flows covering all product functionalities, keeping the end user in mind, trying to discover defects in the early stages of development. </br> - You will need to identify any type of testing that needs to be executed, according to the defined QA strategy and the functionalities that have been prioritized in the sprint. |
- Proactively, you will be able to anticipate the start of the sprint, identifying the possible levels of testing that need to be performed and the different testing activities required. </br> - He/she will have to act as a coach for the rest of the more junior colleagues, facilitating the adoption of good practices. |
| Development support | - You will need to identify the necessary unit and integration tests that need to be run by development for a given functionality in the sprint. </br> - You will need to work with the developers to identify the necessary tests to be covered. </br> - You must carry out walkthroughs with development team to validate that the implementation of the sotries meets the defined quality standards and detect errors in the initial phases of development. |
- You should be able to analyse the results of the tests carried out by development team and provide feedback and ensure that established good practices are followed. </br> - Autonomously identify the tests that must be performed from the development side </br> - Ensure that the tests have been identified, covered and have a favorable result. |
Be able, during the walkthrough phase with development team, to identify other paths/flows not previously specified | - You must support develpment team in the implementation of the defined tests </br> - Ensure that all tests are always executed </br> - Proactively analyze that the tests performed by development team are incremental in each iteration |
- Escalate appropriately any non-conformities detected in the test flow </br> - Coach the more junior QA members, promoting a culture of collaboration |
| Automation | - Understand business-prioritized business flows and their interpretation to facilitate automated product regressions </br> - Collaborate with business and involve them in automation, fostering a culture of collaboration. Sharing the importance of their role within regressions </br> - Adapt, and/or assist in the adaptation, of the created e2e regression flows, to cover critical functionalities not yet covered by product regressions </br> - Share with the regression team any new business-prioritized flows that should be part of the e2e regressions, based on the product regressions performed. |
- Must be able to understand the requirements and ask the necessary questions to complete and implement the regression cases | - You must analyze the proposed business flows according to their criticality and provide appropriate feedback, in case you consider that any case is not critical. </br> - You must know how to ask the necessary and appropriate questions to the business to identify the expected result of the flows prioritized for automation. |
- You must be able to identify additional flows, not covered by the proposed flows, and share the value they would bring to the business. </br> - You must be able to correctly identify the business priority of business flows and share them with the business for approval. |
- Proactively share improvements that are considered appropriate to apply to flows, add new ones or remove obsolete flows or those that do not add value to the business. </br> - It should serve as a reference and support for other more junior QA colleagues. |
| Defect Tracking | You must be able to identify defects in any environment, report them appropriately, following the established template, as well as assign priority and criticality with the help of your QA Coach. | - Establish the criticality and severity of defects, efficiently without help </br> - Ensure that the RCA is being implemented and perform an analysis of the possible causes |
- Monitoring the defects created so that they are prioritized and helping to prevent them by applying the necessary techniques. - Evaluating the possibility of failures. </br> - Ensure that the RCA of defects is correctly established and propose corrective actions to improve the quality. |
- Acquiring understanding and insights regarding the underlying issues in complex problems or situations through the development of abstract representations, the identification of patterns and the analysis of hypotheses. </br> - Share with the PO/PO Tech the importance of resolving defects and ensuring they are resolved in a timely manner according to the priority stablished </br> - Ensure that the RCA of defects is correctly established and implement corrective actions to improve the quality. |
- Can negotiate and make a strong, informed case for why a requirement should be a certain way or why something really is a defect. </br> - It should serve as a reference and support for other more junior QA colleagues. |
| Metrics, KPIs & Reporting | You will need to create the default reporting metrics. | - You will need to constantly monitor the established metrics and report them upwards, to facilitate the QA adoption, showing the benefit offered. | - You will identify and propose additional metrics in your squad, facilitating the adoption of QA. </br> - You will create the metrics and report on them periodically. |
- You will create your own metrics and KPIs to control quality in the Squads to which you have been assigned and will periodically share your results. </br> - You must share the metrics with the QA manager for global implementation if it is necessary. |
- You will create dashboards with complex metrics and KPIs to provide insight into quality within Squads. </br> - These metrics will be at the Squad level and/or domain level, to track the quality. </br> - You must share the metrics with the QA manager for global implementation if it is necessary. |
| AWS | You must have basic knowledge of AWS | ||||
| Devops (CI & CD) | Have basic knowledge of how to adopt the DevOps methodology by introducing practices such as continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), continuous monitoring (CM), and infrastructure as code (IaC). | - Without help, you will need to know how to implement the necessary Pipelines, following the QA strategy, in your respective Squad. | You must have advanced knowledge of the DevSecOps procedure, as well as good practices to be able to apply in the area of continuous testing. |
The following table shows the skills and knowledge that a QA Engineer should have, according to the level of seniority. For more information follow the link to the QA Engineer Competency Definitions.