Quality Assurance Vs. Quality Engineering: Which Is Best?

June 13th, 2024

The debate between QA vs. QE and manual vs. automated has raged on. But it’s high time to end the “versus” mindset. Instead, we should focus on the strengths of both methodologies, recognizing that they play pivotal roles in ensuring top-notch user experiences and high-quality products.

Let’s explore the differences between quality engineering vs. quality assurance and how integrating both can benefit your organization and motivate your testing teams to deliver exceptional results.

Quality Assurance (QA) vs. Quality Engineering (QE)

Quality assurance (QA) aims to identify errors in the final product to confirm that it adheres to quality standards. Quality engineering (QE) focuses on preventing defects from occurring to ensure quality throughout the development lifecycle.

QA, emphasizing manual testing and exploratory techniques, provides the essential groundwork for identifying issues early in development. On the other hand, QE, or quality engineering, leverages automation and performance testing to examine the product’s quality deeply.

To identify defects, QA uses techniques like usability testing, accessibility checks, and performance evaluation. Meanwhile, the proactive approach of preventing defects with QE involves automated tests to streamline the testing process and free up time for more exploratory testing in the QA phase to examine the product’s functionality.

The table below highlights the key QA vs QE differences:

Feature	What is QA in Software Testing?	What is QE in Software Testing?
Focus	QA aims to identify defects in a product in the final stages of development.	QE seeks to prevent defects in a product throughout the product development lifecycle.
Approach	The QA team creates and maintains QA processes and standards. The team tests the product in the final stages against QA standards.	Quality engineers are involved with the development team throughout the software development lifecycle to mitigate the chances of defects.
Responsibilities	QA team designs, develops, and executes tests. These tests include manual testing, exploratory testing, and using automated testing frameworks. QA testers are also responsible for testing products to identify errors and report errors to maintain quality.	QE involves developing and maintaining automated testing and performance testing tools, continuous integration and delivery pipelines, and identifying quality risks early in development.
Scope	QA ensures the product meets quality standards in the later stages of development using pre-built features/ tests.	QE ensures the product meets quality standards from the beginning to the end of the development pipeline to prevent early defects.
Timing	QA testing is carried out at the end of the development cycle, usually in the final stage before release.	QE engages throughout the development cycle from the beginning to the final deployment.
Methods	Manual testing, automated testing, usability testing, performance testing, defect tracking, test case development, and maintenance.	Automation tools, quality management systems, DevOps, in-depth performance testing, and CI/CD pipelines for testing and deployment.
Objective	To ensure the product meets quality requirements, eliminate existing issues, and provide a positive user experience.	To prevent errors and bugs from occurring and continuously improve the product quality throughout the development.
Expertise/ skills	Domain knowledge, testing expertise, analytical thinking, and communication skills.	Automation skills, strong software development lifecycle (SDLC) knowledge, risk management, and analytical skills.
Examples	Testing a car’s features to ensure it functions as intended, such as driving tests, charging functionality tests, comfort tests, etc.	Ensuring the car’s manufacturing incorporates features that align with quality standards from the beginning. For example, automated test scripts to simulate various driving scenarios, stress test the battery system, and automatically check for software bugs.

QA vs QE

Traditional QA Testing For High-Quality User Experience

QA is the first battleground any team has with a product to deliver. While QE can automate some tests, you still need a solid manual, QA-centric approach to start that development and cover all automated blind spots.

Thorough testing by QA professionals can uncover usability issues, inconsistencies, and edge cases that might resist QE’s automated tests due to their inherent limitations. Ensuring robust testing coverage in areas like smoke testing lets your team see issues early on without wasting time writing excess code.

Another vein of testing unique to QA is exploratory testing, which well-defined processes of QE fail to achieve. It’s impossible to cover all the functional requirements of a system with test cases that follow a predefined script. Unlike QE’s structured approach, QA evaluates product performance from a user perspective.

Exploratory testing adds another verification layer by helping unearth issues not covered by QE’s proactive approach. It provides rapid feedback at the early stages of software development and reviews the product characteristics from a user perspective. QA’s exploratory testing focuses on flexibility, while QE’s processes are rigid and based on predefined scripts.

Experimental tests are also instrumental in uncovering impactful quality issues when teams need more time to prepare structured or automated test cases.

QA Testing Limitations

While QA excels in testing product features and functionalities that might go unnoticed in QE, it also has some limitations.

One of the primary limitations of QA is missing opportunities to prevent defects early on, since QA focuses on testing product quality in later stages.

The inclination of companies toward agile methodology requires more frequent testing in smaller phases. It can be difficult to ensure comprehensive testing in smaller periods. Moreover, manual testing can be time-consuming and error-prone.

Diving Into Automation and Performance with QE

While QA handles hands-on testing, QE takes testing strategies further. Using automated testing cases and DevOps integrations, QE empowers a more in-depth approach to quality. Good automation is reusable, versatile, and flexible, often integrating directly into development platforms.

Automated tests are not magic; maintaining their quality is crucial for result-oriented quality engineering. Thoroughly maintained and monitored automation tests help identify bottlenecks in systems, allowing proactive resolution.

Performance testing management also gives insights into customer experience by simulating real-world product usage. This highlights the product’s improvement areas, resulting in faster bug fixes and successful product releases.

Quality Engineer Approach

Quality engineering processes align well with agile development and DevOps processes. They use automated tests that provide extensive coverage throughout a product’s development. QE ensures a product meets quality standards from the beginning, which results in improved software quality and reduced costs.

Since QE tests focus on detecting bugs from the beginning, they minimize the total number of defects to be analyzed by QA in the final stages. This means faster product releases by quickly freeing up QA resources and identifying bottlenecks.

Also, when testing is the responsibility of the QE team, developers focus on feature design and delivering high-quality products.

Shifting from QA to QE involves creating new roles like software development engineers in test (SDETs), continuous improvement (CI) engineers, performance test specialists, security test specialists, and user experience testers.

It also requires recognizing that quality belongs to the whole organization and goes beyond technical roles.

Limitations of Pure QE

It’s important to recognize that QE isn’t the complete solution to QA’s limitations. Like the pure QA approach, the QE approach has limitations when used without QA in the testing strategy. These limitations include:

Missed Edge Cases

While automation is important to test product features throughout the development cycle, it can miss complex user interactions and edge cases. Automation without skilled manual testing fails to focus on a user-centric approach.

Cost Overhead

Relying on QE in software testing without manual testing requires a comprehensive suite of automated tests, which can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. Missing edge cases due to the absence of final-stage QA can result in product failures and significant losses. A balanced combination of QA and QE is necessary for optimum results.

Potential for Bias

QE requires continuous maintenance, as outdated test scripts can lead to misleading results. If scripts are not regularly updated, they may produce false positives or negatives, introducing software development issues. The lack of manual testing in QE makes product success dependent on automated tests.

Fusing QA and QE for Better and Faster Global Products

Fused software testing merges the strengths of both QA and QE for powerful testing strategies. This allows you to reap the benefits of manual user-based testing with the power and speed of an automated workflow. Doing so is a major boon for any software development team.

It can be a difficult task to understand the flaws and drawbacks of a piece of software. When using fused testing, you can significantly speed up the development process while maintaining the human touch to refine and shape your product for the end user.

Fused software testing allows failed automated tests to be rapidly assessed for root cause problems (flakey tests, candidate bugs, etc.) and quickly made actionable via burstable human touches.

Fusing QA and QE testing methodology into a cohesive whole can benefit your organization while ensuring your testing teams are rested, in good spirits, and motivated to deliver the best possible results.

Testlio’s fused software testing solution transcends the tradeoffs of the two approaches to deliver reduced quality costs, expand testing coverage, and improve release velocity.