Bug Reporting Skills Every QA Should Have
Being a QA engineer or agent is a demanding job. It requires them to be diligent in their work to ensure everything is up to the quality standards. A QA engineer comes across the need to complete manual testing when carrying out a bug report and chances are high that you may not have the right tools for that. Bug reporting as a QA engineer is one of the essential skills that one should have. For those who are looking forward to becoming one, this article will provide the essential bug reporting skills that every great QA expert should have.
Bug reporting is an activity of posting a bug to the development team to resolve it. Bug reporting can be done using a simple spreadsheet or bug management tools. Let’s have a look at the essential skills for a bug reporter:
Good Communication Skills:
A QA professional should have good communication skills. Communication is not only important to the overall development of the team ad direction that it provides when a bug report is being carried out. Yet, with bug reporting and manual testing, QA professionals are required to communicate their findings to ensure the QA standard is maintained and kept up to date. It will also update the team on the issues that they may experience along with the testing periods. This is why QA needs to have exceptional communication skills.
Technical Skills
As a QA engineer you constantly need to look for bugs in software apps while manual testing. In order to find bugs more efficiently it is important to have good technical and development skills. It is necessary to be familiar with programming languages that were used in the development of a product and any configurations that will be used in the system. They should have a basic understanding of the technologies and use the bug management tools. In addition, they should also be good at communicating with the developers about any issues that may have appeared.
Be a Good Negotiator
Although it sounds absurd, negotiation is a part of a QA engineer’s daily routine. To get things done in a reasonable time, negotiation skills are important. Developers are busy with development work, so they have some time to fix bugs. This means there will be a whole lot of back and forth between QA and software development team regarding when and what should be done. This does not happen with small issues but can be an important factor when dealing with larger issues.
Conclusion
QA engineers are responsible for a number of things in a project. They are not only required to report the bugs, but they also need to manage them efficiently. Bug management tools can help QA teams in improving the software quality. They can also help QA engineers in reporting the bugs more efficiently and resolving them before the bugs can turn into bigger and more costly issues once released to the end-users.
