Article summary
Responding to the assertion that QATesting “is not possible,” someone might say, “What? Of course, QATesting is possible. We do it all the time. When something is in the Quality Assurance (QA) column, it means the app has been put on the QA drive for QA to do QA on.”
QA vs. Testing
Recently, I’ve become more active online. I’ve reconnected with some old friends from the test community and made some new ones. I’ve also surfed the latest discussions on LinkedIn and found that people are still posting about the distinction between QA and testing.
It’s been a common discussion. Way back in 2008, I wrote a “testing cliches” blog post listing many other blog posts about how a test is not QA. I see references to QA testing and QA column in our company Slack and get introduced as “the QA person.”
Is it really a fight worth having? What happens when I’m asked if I can give a project some QA help?
I assume they want some help testing the app they are working on. They could also mean they want help setting up processes and procedures. For example, they might need to know how to deal with incoming bug reports. Is there a triage process set up, who should run it, and who needs to be involved? QA is process-oriented; testing is product-oriented.
Examples
Here are a few examples of the difference.
Say you’re testing a release and keep finding the same type of bug with every release (e.g double clicking submit creates duplicate records). It can be frustrating and boring to log the same bug repeatedly. A QA process could check for any patterns in the bugs being logged. Then, if there is one, a QA specialist might recommend training the developers to be aware of such issues so that they write tests and check for this before it gets into the release for the tester to find and log again.
Or, say that, as a tester, you’re brought onto a project and start testing. You find a bug. Do you know how and where to report it? What happens after you’ve logged it? Who will look at it, and when and what will they do with it?
A QA process might make sure that all stories have acceptance criteria. A tester would test to find what acceptance criteria had been missed. For example, that might be: the acceptance criteria of accepting valid numbers didn’t account for the case of entering 999e99, and the app treating the ‘e’ as an exponent.
A tester can test the app all day and log many bugs. A QA process will check how many and what severity the bugs are and set a process in place if the number is too high instead of hoping the tester will do this.
Be aware of the difference so that, on your project, you can ask for the right sort of help!