Quality Assurance, is not only a stage in the software development cycle, but a component of the whole process for the development, testing and validation, and delivery of the software to the customer. It cannot be seen as the stage when the QA Teams start interacting with the developed software. The QA phase starts as soon the Features, User Stories or Requirements are defined, and should have contributed also for those definitions. 

What matters is that our final product or service does what is meant to do, with the expected performance and quality. 

Sometimes the best bug is the one found by chance, especially when it was not foreseen by the development or project management teams. One of my favorites was the bad validation of passwords, which was only considering the initial six characters, so no matter how long and complex the stored password was, it would only validate the first six characters. Another bug that was causing a crash of the application, when we entered a negative decimal value in a certain field for the distance in kilometers of optical fiber.

I like to think that I am the very first user of our software, I am the representative of the end user, and I need to do the expected actions they will do, but also the unexpected actions (like in the previous example of the negative decimal value 🙂 ). I like to be in that role, even if, for example, the target user is a pregnant woman. What matters is that our final product or service does what is meant to do, with the expected performance and quality.

Interested in becoming a Quality Assurance Engineer or working at Verhaert Digital like Hélio?