Quality Engineering Can Ignite Your Automation Strategy

Kassidy Kelley , Managing Editor

December 16th, 2022

With today’s accelerated pace of delivery, you need to manage dev speed while keeping high-quality ships. This requires a focus on both quality assurance and development into quality engineering. These two goals can often be at odds without a robust system for process and testing.  

So how is quality engineering different from QA? QE techniques specifically focus on analyzing, planning, creating, and implementing automated testing scripts that can be executed in multiple environments, ensuring your quality engineering efforts are future-proof. Automated tests are executed, optimized, investigated, triaged, and maintained.Let’s dive into the differences between quality engineering and quality assurance, and explore how QE can help boost your automation strategy.

Quality Engineering vs. Quality Assurance

If you’re on Testlio.com, you know what QA is. A brief: QA validates that web and mobile applications execute actions as they should and meet requirements. In contrast, Quality Engineering (QE) is a more robust and agile discipline that injects quality into the entire product lifecycle beyond the development phase. This hinges on the quality and proficiency of the QE team, as well as a holistic mindset shift across the company to embrace a higher level of quality across the CI/CD cycle. Quality Engineers focus on quality from concept onwards, utilizing test- and behavior-driven development techniques to establish criteria pertinent to the developers and testers.

We produced a detailed guide into the differences between QA and QE if you’re interested to find out more.

The two are inherently linked. Quality assurance is a subset of QE, applied to specific software development, and requires integrating automation testing throughout the DevOps process with an eye toward transparency and traceability. QE is also about automated testing as a discipline, with automated test creation, automation management, and performance testing. A strong QE strategy will embed QA into everything it does as an integral part of the QE process to deliver products efficiently. 

How QE services can boost automated testing strategies 

A commitment to QE and utilizing professional quality engineers can maximize your automated testing investments, which can be leveraged across multiple projects. QEs consistently create, run, optimize and manage automated software tests, focus on quality throughout multiple development lifecycles and push teams closer to continuous testing and integration.

#The dedication to automation that’s baked into QE strategies also makes it easy for organizations to shift left to incorporate automated testing ever earlier in the dev cycle. At the same time, a shift right strategy incorporates test workloads later in SDLC to include automation and humans for end-to-end testing and testing in the wild with real people and devices. Part-time, full-time, or freelance quality engineers create, run, optimize, and manage automated software tests, leveraging frameworks and governance systems. However, finding and retaining automated testing talent is challenging as the depth of knowledge required to master QE in an automated environment is steep. That’s where Testlio can help with our automated testing services.

Quality engineering use cases

Many teams need help with the earliest capabilities of test automation, such as regression testing. The challenges of writing scripts that span projects and maintaining them can be burdensome. Teams often need clarification about when and where to apply test automation.

Developing quality engineering testing that will last requires experienced Quality Engineers and an automated testing strategy, including:

• Alignment of stakeholders: Creating agreement on the scope of testing and priorities.
• Earlier code testing: Automated testing earlier in the production cycle helps catch errors earlier, reducing rework and costs.
• Writing small test cases: With automated scripts, it’s crucial to break down sequences of steps and test each sequence individually – the more minor individual test cases are, the more longevity they have.
• Creating test cases independent of UI: Tests should be written to target backend functions using a domain language approach rather than naming UI elements or pathways that may change over time or for other projects.
• The right testing environment: This includes the development, maintenance, and management of the central repository with updated versions of testing environments, which can be complex, especially if you are working remotely or have distributed teams
• Knowing which tests to automate: Automation excels at unit and integration tests and provides repeatable results. Repetitive and data-intensive tests are prime targets; however, UI and UX testing require a more human touch to gauge the look and feel of apps.

When you have the right quality engineers managing your test automation, they can guide a fused testing environment, balancing automated tests with manual tests. They can also decipher the noise to keep projects on track and write, execute, and analyze test cases for improved quality.

With the right QE team and tech stack, you can:

• Accelerate time to market
• Scale testing volume and frequency
• Improve the digital experience (DX) for consumers
• Enable more predictable and consistent releases

Testlio can provide the QE expertise you need, on-demand quality engineers, and leverage a fused testing methodology to accelerate production and drive quality. With a network of more than 10,000 vetted QE and WA freelancers in 150 countries and an integrated platform that supports automated testing and CI/CD, Testlio has the expertise you need to deliver better software, faster.