Bug Reporting Skills That A QA Specialist Should Have
By Ray Parker
In modern software development, great responsibilities lie on senior executives, managers, developers, and QA testing teams. The success of a software does not solely rely on developers or testers anymore, as decision making lies at various levels of the hierarchy during the entire development process. Defect management is a process of identifying bugs and rectifying them. QA experts use different defect tracking tools that maximize the chances of keeping an application bug-free.
A QA specialist should have the following bug reporting skills to manage defects efficiently:
- Communication Skills
Organizations lose a lot of money due to poor communication between various team members. Development teams are so busy taking up different tasks and testing various test cases that they often miss the guidelines. Thus, QA agent keeps all the relevant members in loop and disseminates information for immediate actions. Due to work load, developers may fail to communicate freely every now and then. So, QA agents should be open to engage with other team members easily.
- Technical Skills
Testers develop strong technical and development skills to detect bugs and provide details to rectify them. A tester must be familiar with programming languages so that he can work closely with developers for efficient tracking of bugs. It is not a hard and fast rule to have technical skills, but it can be a plus-point for a tester to carry out his work without much efforts.
- Negotiation Skills
A QA tester’s job gets easier when he is comfortable communicating with other teams. Testers need to negotiate with developers and other stakeholders every now and then, in order to fix the bugs at the right time. So, they must decide whether a small bug can have a huge impact on the application, or require an immediate fix.
- Testing Skills
Testing is the main domain for QA experts, so this is something they should be experts at. For effective bug tracking, testers should know about testing workflows, techniques, and tools. If they lack testing skills, they are not the right person for this testing.
- Product Understanding
A QA expert can achieve his goals only when he completely understands the product from a user’s perspective. When he has clarity on this subject, communicating with other teams is just a piece of cake. For instance, if a bug in an application is identified, the expert requires additional information regarding that error. This is where understanding the product inside out from a user’s end is necessary.
QA specialists should have the above-mentioned skills so that they can work relentlessly in effective bug tracking. Bug tracking tools are designed to identify, track and manage defects in tests which can be viewed later-on for avoiding any errors in future.
Author Bio:
Ray Parker is a senior marketing consultant with a knack for writing about latest news in tech, quality assurance, software development and travel. With a decade of experience working in the tech industry, ray now dabbles out of his New York office.