#TestCulture 🦅 Episode 25 – Test Automation for QA Managers
Tags: testing, agile, devops, webdev
Published: 2023-02-20 09:30:32

The Quality Assurance (QA) Manager oversees the activity of the Quality Assurance department and staff, developing, implementing and maintaining a quality and reliability testing system for the organization's products and/or development processes.

A QA Manager is responsible for monitoring, inspecting and proposing measures to correct or improve an organization's final products in order to meet established quality standards. 🧑🏻‍🔧

In the software development process, quality assurance testing has a unique place. The QA Manager is responsible for ensuring that the software developed is bug-free and works according to technical and business requirements.

QA Engineers must have a good understanding of each project and what they need to accomplish. They must deliver quality software to customers.

Given the responsibility of the job, they face many challenges in their daily tasks… 📃

1️⃣ Dealing with unstable environments
Usually, QA teams face unstable environment configuration issues that we have to prepare for most.

2️⃣ Overfed tools
From time to time, we realize that a tool is not the right choice for the project. We have no choice but to continue using it because the customers or the organization already have licenses and won't buy new ones until the current license expires.

3️⃣ Tight deadlines
The biggest challenge for QA is to receive last minute testing requests. The main reasons for these requests are that the development process takes longer than expected and that the time spent on testing is underestimated.
When the QA department has a short time frame for testing, it should verify the software against key business specifications. Software Testing should begin at least three days before product release.

4️⃣ Testing documents created by others
In the case of quality assurance, it is faster to create a document from scratch than to use one created by others. Using test cases created by others increases the verification time and poses limitations on finding bugs.

5️⃣ Bug fixing during testing
Developers and QA engineers must work together. #Testing should be done once part of the development process is complete, and after that, the bug fixing activity should begin. The QA submits a test report, and it is only once the debugging begin.
There are many other concerns, but some solutions exist, such as test automation… 🔧

Integrating functional GUI Testing directly into the development phase and working in short cycles is key to identify quality problems as early as possible. For that, you can think about Shift Left. 🧐

**The result:** your team tests your application in real-time, new features are produced without regression using CI/CD processes and tools, and applications can de deployed in the Cloud without manual validation.

‘_Less time allocated to test maintenance means more time to new tests creation_’… 💭

With an automation testing tool, you have full control on how your components are identified, and as a consequence software refactoring has less impact on testing.

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📚 Sources:

🕸️https://loginradius.com/blog/engineering/challenges-faced-by-qa/ 

🌐 https://resources.workable.com/quality-assurance-specialist-job-description/

🦅 https://www.agilitest.com/solutions/qa-manager 

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[Thread on Twitter.](https://twitter.com/agilitest/status/1585648205089239042?s=20)