Must have skill set of experienced QA folks

QAs are not just bug hunters they are the quality architects for any project/product and the guardians of the company’s reputation.

However, when the technology, agile, and DevOps methodologies are advancing rapidly, accelerated development and continuous deployments are getting more complex, making testing a quite critical phase. It allows testers to work harder and demands more deliberation.

QA engineers require many additional skills to carry out their roles successfully, deliver exceptional software applications, and facilitate the roles of the developers within their organization.

Here are some of the key hard and soft skills of an experienced QA engineer should possess to scale and conquer in their career!

• Prepare test strategy: Acting as a reference for all stakeholders involved in testing, this document ensures a unified understanding of the overall testing strategy.
• Requirements Analysis: Software requirement analysis simply means a complete study, analysis and describing software requirements so that requirements that are genuine and needed can be fulfilled to solve problems.
• Competitor Analysis: Depending on your business, you can analyze competitors in many ways. A competitor analysis can help you understand the market landscape and make informed decisions to improve your position in the industry.
• Identify User Personas: Persona-based testing is a testing approach that involves creating fictional users that represent the real end users and will show how the user would interact.
• Estimations: Implement Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) if feasible. Test estimation is done to answer two critical questions, overall cost and time taken. This is an essential aspect for small projects that have a limited budget.
• Tool evaluations (Subject to the need)
• Evaluate automation feasibility: It involves assessing various factors such as technical capability, cost-effectiveness, resource availability, and the impact on productivity and quality.
• Risk analysis: This is a very underestimated activity but it is very important which covers Technical risks, External risks, Market risks, Budget risk, Business/Operational risks etc.
• Bug Isolation: Bug isolation refers to the isolation of the cause of the defect, i.e. the fault in the code. For example, the wrong parameter was passed to a function, leading to the wrong output.
• Root cause analysis: Root cause analysis(RCA) is used in software testing to identify defects. It's typically used to identify the cause of problems and address that instead of just treating the symptoms. This will help in Bug prevention as well.

Feel free to add on any other important skill set that you find is needful for an experienced QA person.