In IT Industry specially in an independent software testing company, Product Owners- be it the Project Manager or Business Analyst, are mostly from development background. In general, developers have some misconceptions about QA and thus during SDLC, QA either doesn’t find any place or comes at last place in priority list. They have a tendency to think about specialized quality checks as least required thing and they think that it is a waste of time and money and keeping QA away from the project will reduce cost and in turn expect quality to directly come from production teams. Now question arises why they have misconceptions about QA?

 

Answer: They carry some myths about QA which derive them to think so. Following are some of them.

 

Question: So what exactly QA Engineer’s overall roles and responsibilities are?

Answer: Generally QA and Testing are considered as identical but QA has more responsibilities than just writing test cases and do testing: 

 

While he still writing tests and report bugs, with this he is also supporting various roles and responsibilities on the team. He is an important part of the team.

 

 

Question: So Why is it so important to include QA Engineer during initial business meetings?

Answer: Early inclusion of QA Engineer results in better product knowledge. If QA is incorporated right from the beginning stage of an assignment where he works almost with business analysts and developers, he can work as a BA as well. 

 

While development team stay focused on gathering requirement and more focused on technology side, QA focuses on risk involved in the functionality and shares feedback to Business Analyst. Feedbacks/Concerns are shared with the business stakeholders and then, based on the feedbacks from QA, business stakeholders may make educated decisions regarding changes in the initial idea. Why? The business cannot understand test cases & test results and only understands risks. After discussing each and every part of risk analysis, we finally ends up with a product idea which is less risky and more feasible & usable. Like this, QA team partner provides risk based information and becomes partner in decision making. This results in reducing overall cost of developing and delivery quality software.