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Cover image for What makes a good QA Engineer Part 1: Tester Mindset
Moaaz Adel
Moaaz Adel

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What makes a good QA Engineer Part 1: Tester Mindset

In this series, we will discover in a nutshell and straightforward points what makes a good Quality Assurance Engineer that rocks.

The name of the series is inspired by this song What makes a good man, which I encourage you to listen, it's really a good one. :D

So without long intro, let's go ahead and start with the part 1 and the most important skill (in my opinion), which is The Tester Mindset.

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The following 10 skills are what shapes the mindset of a good QA Engineer:

  1. Critical thinking: having an open mindset instead of clinging onto prejudices. Thinks, challenges, explores, investigates and questions rather than just accepts, checks, validates and verifies.
  2. Curious about learning and exploring.
  3. Evaluating the possibility of failures.
  4. Aiming to NOT just find bugs, but prevent them.
  5. Flexible: able to switch between big-picture (which could also be called business-oriented) and detailed analytical mindsets at need.
  6. Making sure the app doesn’t do what it isn’t supposed to do (which is different than making sure it does what it is supposed to do) but in an efficient manner.
  7. Being able to spot patterns and inconsistencies.
  8. The more time testers spend doing manual tasks like documenting test cases, the less time they have to do value-added activities like finding defects
  9. Don’t focus on the overall defect count (Focusing on quantity over quality is a mistake).
  10. Everyone must be focused on creating the best experience possible for the end-user.

Conclusion:
The most important skill that shapes a good QA Engineer is the mindset, that will difference between being an OK QA engineer and good one.

See you in the part 2.
Thanks for reading and happy testing ❤️ ❤️ 😃
Feel free to reach out on Linkedin.

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