Magnifiers of IT sector: What is quality assurance (QA) profession?

The quality assurance profession is especially appealing to people who are curious, striving for perfection, and seeking a relatively easy entry into the IT sector. These specialists, as can be assumed from the name, are responsible for ensuring the quality of newly created programs, websites, and applications. The name of this profession is most often found with the combination of Latin letters QA (quality assurance). The work of quality assurance specialists is one of the key stages of the program creation cycle.

The profession, having a history of only two decades, is still in the formative stage, narrow specializations are created—for example, QA engineer, QA analyst, or QA tester. The differences are mainly in the approaches and directions of quality assurance. For example, one specialist checks the written "programming code," another—the applicability of the created program, etc. But the boundaries between these narrow specializations are still rather vague, and very often the above terms are used as synonyms.

What does QA Specialist do?

The task of a QA specialist is to follow the process of creating programs, to check and test them in detail, and to propose correction and improvement steps that will bring the final result in line with the defined quality standards. Simply put, the task of a QA specialist is to deliver a product with minimal defects to the client, or what is the same, to ensure its high quality. Their work focuses on one question: does this program meet the customer's needs? They say that the best testers are the customers, and therefore QA specialists must imagine themselves in the role of that skeptical and demanding customer, underscore all the dark corners of the carefully written program, and highlight the problems and shortcomings.

The main requirements for testers are: analytical thinking, attention to details, mastering the basics of software testing, and knowledge of programming languages and software creation cycle. Some other requirements may arise from the nature of the program—website, application, game, etc.—being tested.

Today, there are many online and offline courses and literature that can help you master the basics of quality assurance in a few months. But the specialty of this profession—which, by the way, is typical of many IT professions—is that it is not possible to become an expert just by attending courses, or on the basis of reading the literature. The basic skills are acquired directly during the work because the requirements of the clients are different, and it is almost impossible to apply a unified and universal approach for everyone.

Quality assurance profession in Armenia

QA specialists, like almost all IT professions, are quite in demand in Armenia, and are mostly found under the titles of QA specialist or QA engineer.

They also add to the list of positions with relatively high salaries. Thus, the monthly salary of testers in Armenia ranges from 100 thousand to 1 million drams.