Engineering

Quality Assurance the Wizeline way

Quality Assurance the Wizeline way

Learn how the Wizeline QA Team focuses on delivering quality products and applying the best practices to all the building steps.

At Wizeline, we focus on quality while executing our clients’ needs. This is why the Wizeline QA Team concentrates on delivering excellent products and applying the best practices to all the building steps.

What is Wizeline’s approach to QA? 

Our Quality Assurance practice is something that has evolved over the years. At Wizeline, we believe that this approach should not be evaluated outside of the development life cycle. The earlier, the better, right? As a team, we ensure that we validate things that should be reviewed early in our development process and not until the features are ready to “test.” Quality Assurance at Wizeline is also about the quality of building the product besides validating the final functionality.

Why is it important to work with the highest quality in the competitive IT world?

With the speed that software is developed nowadays, the competition between companies launching new products is bigger. The differentiator of what the consumer chooses mostly depends on the reliability and quality of the product. This is why having a product with the highest quality is so important.

The software QA engineer role has been evolving for the last couple of years at Wizeline. It’s been an accelerated evolution of different continuous strategies, DevOps, and Agile approaches that have shifted and refined how people perceive testing value in projects.

The traditional idea of “verifying the software to make sure it meets requirements and is bug-free” is a testing-as-an-execution activity. The Wizeline QA team is continuously driven by a need to reformulate this idea and evolve, to learn from change, and improve in all areas. As part of this development, our team members strive to add value and build trust every day in other phases of the project, where a QA was previously not required to participate.

How does our QA team work, and why do we focus on a continuous testing culture? 

First of all, the quality of the software is a team responsibility. The QA engineer is in charge of setting the best practices for the whole development process to achieve this goal. The premise is to prevent bugs by establishing a feedback loop in the early stages and subsequently in all development stages.

Continuous testing as a culture is our flag; we follow five principles:

  • QA is everyone’s responsibility
  • Shift left approach
  • Automation testing
  • Continuous improvement
  • QA Engineer role

QA is everyone’s responsibility

We believe that all team members cooperate to achieve a common goal; that’s why software quality is a team responsibility. Communication is the principal tool, as the team is focused on building the best system.

Shift left approach

We set the shift-left approach for bug prevention and bug detection, where we move the feedback and testing to the early stages of the project and subsequently to all other stages. Hence, the testing checks run continuously, and fixes can be applied sooner. 

 

There are a lot of good practices on this strategy that can provide feedback, such as:

  • Definition of Ready (DoR), Definition of Done (DoD), workflow or mockup test dry runs, and creating test scenarios.
  • Static code analysis, code standards, security or vulnerability checks, unit testing, and code reviews before integrating code.
  • Setting continuous testing where there is a continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment or delivery (CD). This means that when integration is happening, the automated tests are executed in the same pipelines to provide feedback about the changes immediately.
  • Complement automation testing by doing exploratory testing.

Automation testing

The automation testing is ruled by the automation pyramid, where the base is the unit testing, which is very important for backend and frontend applications. Then, the integration testing or the API testing, and at the end, the UI Testing. There are always adaptations since needs vary by project, but this is the general premise.

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Continuous improvement

As earlier mentioned, all needs vary by project, so we need to adopt these practices to every circumstance we face. However, we should always track and measure the processes with helpful metrics to continuously make improvements.

QA Engineer Role

The QA Engineer is an essential part of this process. The engineer must know how to improve the development process to focus on quality, so they should be a test strategist. For continuous testing performed by automation testing, the QA Engineer should also be an automation tester.
The feedback loop is complemented by exploratory testing, so the QA engineer must be a functional tester. All the projects are different, so the QA engineer should be an API tester or Mobile tester as well. The systems also need to be fast and reliable, so the QA engineer should be a performance tester.

What are the key skills we look for in our QA Engineers? 

At Wizeline, we strive to hire talent that has the potential to grow and can adapt to different circumstances.  

Some of the technical skills a QA Engineer should have are:

  • Automation testing knowledge to build an automation test framework from scratch using the best practices.
  • Test strategy design – being an expert that proposes and applies the best testing solution for any project and needs.

A QA Engineer must possess important soft skills such as creativity, ownership, adaptability, quick learning, and assertive communication.

There’s an opportunity with your name on it.

The Wizeline QA team has doubled its size in the last year, and our forecast for the next quarter is to increase by another 50%. Therefore we are actively looking for engineers eager to grow and develop their potential and build a career at Wizeline.  

Apply or share our open roles: 

Software QA Engineer Mexico based remote

Software QA Engineer Spain based remote

Software QA Engineer Colombia based remote

 


Aisha Owolabi

Posted by Aisha Owolabi on December 3, 2020