Syntactive Blog

Top skills for a QA Engineer

Introduction

Anyone can be a tester, but what does it take to excel in the role? What hard and soft skills are necessary to be invaluable to the development process? In this blog we will talk about various attributes that when mastered, will up your quality assurance game and make you a so called expert bug-killer.

Soft Skills

Whilst often underestimated, soft skills are extremely crucial to work well within a team or organization. You can be an expert in any programming language, scripting language or framework, but as long as you can't properly communicate with your teammates, you will hit your limits quickly.

• Diplomacy. The way you communicate something is often more important than what you are actually communicating. Avoiding stepping on someone's toes when expressing a potentially conflicting opinion. Be mindful of when to compromise and when to stand your ground to keep collaboration with your team fruitful and productive.
• Self-organized. Self discipline improves every aspect of your work. Setting your own standards will keep you structured and efficient and also makes you an excellent role model for your peers in the field. Structured engineers and managers can take on much responsabillity and are easily relied upon by their team.
• Curious. Being curious and adventurous will allow you to get out of your comfort zone and learn new things. Always look for ways to improve yourself and the processes around you to become better each day.
• Mentoring. Share your experiences and knowledge whenever possible so you grow together as a team. Sharing your skills helps the team to scale and take on more responsabillity.
• Stay positive. Even in the greatest environments unfortunate things can happen. Try to not take them personally and stay optimistic. Failure is part of every journey and always teaches you a valuable lesson.

As seen above, soft skills come in various flavors and each contribute enormously to your success as an engineer or leading role. They are not as easy to learn as hard skills and it's therefor imperative that you work on them early on and continuously. You might not match with every person in the workplace but it will help you make the best of every situation.