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QA Engineers Must Code

Author: Syafiq Hadzir
Email: syafiqhadzir@live.com.my
GPG Key: EBE8 BD81 6838 1BAF

Table of Contents

Should QA Engineers Code?

Quality assurance (QA) engineers may not be as technical as developers; but that doesn’t mean QA shouldn’t learn nor write codes.

It is a ludicrous lack of understanding in concept of assurance when assigning an illiterate person to ensure a masterpiece (read: software) quality to customers.

Everyone Should Write Something

If the developers write codes and the managers write documentations, competent QA engineers write both. We are working in the intersections remember? Of course it won’t be writing as much as they would.

QA engineers should be edgy when it comes to technology. It’s good to live on the edges. We have plenty open-source tools around us to ease up the testing process. It will always end up useless for someone who can’t code. Not just you can’t ease yourself with tasks, you can’t even speak up to developers when it comes to technical matters.

There are plenty of testing methodologies that require code literacy. Unit testing, automation end-to-end testing, performance testing, security testing etc., you name it.

QA Engineers Should Review Code

The concept of code review is often misunderstood. Thus, people tend to think that end-to-end testing is sufficient. But it is not. This confusion could bounce back with consequences to deal with.

In the age of Agile, code review is a must-have practice where the source code is broken into small pieces, which then is inspected by the supervisor. This should be done not only by developers, but QA testers as well.

Code review is the process where mistakes are detected and early bugs are caught. This will also be the time when you realise the importance of code comments.

Conclusion

QA engineers must be literate enough to build static websites. By the way, HTML are just taggings and classes after all. Don’t worry, code won’t do harm, ignorance does.