Few concerns that Local QA community should be focus

By working 7+ years in local IT industry & by interviewing plenty of QA job seekers, I’m having good experience about the attitude of Sri lankan QA community. 

Why their job treated as less important? Why they get paid less than developers? I would like to discuss few major reasons for that.

Is testing the easiest step in software development life cycle???

Absolutely Not. Why? Before that, I would like to ask another question on top. QA should involve in which step of the SDLC? 4th? Wrong again.

Basically, software quality assurance means finding the differences between customer’s requirement and developer’s output. For that QA engineer should have to have a clear understanding about requirement spec. So, he should involve at the first step of SDLC. Considerable percentage of his duty is depending on documentation. Huge management part is included too. Also QA engineer can use many tools and technologies to ease his life. I have interviewed some fresh graduates that believe QA is the first and easiest step to enter the IT industry. They are not the right choice for a company since they will left their job soon after understand the reality.

Lack of technical skills

Lack of technical skills is the biggest worry about Sri lankan QA engineers.

How many of they can work with WAMP & deploy a tool like test link, mantis or flyspray by themselves?

How many of they can do a small PHP script modification on MANTIS installation?

How many of they can configure ODBC connection or write a simple sql script to verify data without having help of dev guy? It’s very less. So, from company point of view QA guy have to compensate for developer’s lost time.

Lack of Training and Knowledge sharing mechanism.
We don’t conduct proper training for QA engineers and we don’t have any common media or centralized location to share their knowledge /experience. As a result of that, QA fellows are hardly invent new mechanism or tool for their companies. They just use conventional tools and technologies to survive. By experience I know only few QA engineers have expert knowledge of selenium automation. Some guys think, they need massive development knowledge to write a automation script. On the other hand, most of the local IT companies under estimate the value of QA, they don’t like to spend money on commercial QA tools like load runner, QAP, quality center. They mostly rely on manual testing and that will cost more time and effort.

Job dissatisfaction due to un-organized QA structure.

How many IT companies in Sri lanka provide a QA manager for their test team? I think it’s very few. Most of the time, they are reporting to the project manager or development manager.

PMs just have an overall view of the project. They don’t depend much about QA estimation. Just thinking of reaching deadlines & force QA fellows to do last minute testing. That will put QA fellow under more pressure and cause job dissatisfaction.

Job dissatisfaction is a separate topic to be discussed. Anyway, By combining all above points I would say, Local QA community should be focus on improving their technical skills. QA engineer with technical skills is a gem for a company.