This article provides information about the role of Quality Assurance (QA) Analysts in software projects. It explains the benefits of having QA Analysts on projects for both the customer and the project team. The article also outlines the tasks and responsibilities of QA Analysts, including communication with the customer, software demo preparation, bug administration, and UAT testing assistance.

QA Role

This page should help the solution sales team to know more about QA Analyst role and identify how much it is needed on the project.

Questions you can ask the customer to clarify his experience:

• Do you have experience with software testing on the projects?

• Do you use any tools for software testing and test management? (like JIRA, X-Ray, ALM, SPIRA, … - it is also possible they use Excel)

• Who do you expect will do the testing? (business users or IT software testers)

• Do you have experience with UAT testing? (user acceptance testing)

• Do you have any experience with writing test cases, organizing testing during the project, reporting issues?

The answers to these questions can give us better knowledge about how much experience our customer has and how much support from QA Analyst he really will need.

The description of QA Analyst role is here Customer Assistance , it can be shared with the customer.

The description of UAT phase is here https://pricefx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/CUST/pages/2006155482 it can be also shared with the customer. The presentation is in line with our project methodology and it can help to explain details about this project phase and how QA Analyst can help the customer. It is expected the customer will discuss details about UAT later directly with the QA Analyst.

Some expectations from the customers are more misunderstandings of the role QA Analyst - please check truths and myths section on our Confluence https://pricefx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/CUST/pages/1932329897

Advantage of QAs on Projects

The main reasons why to have QA Analyst on the project are:

Benefits for the customer

• the customer is responsible for performing UAT testing - full support of QA Analyst will help the customer be prepared for this project phase

• the QA Analyst can share our best practices from our projects with the customer - documents and presentations for this are ready (how to create test cases, how to organize UAT, how to report bugs). The QA Analyst is ready to discuss those things with the customer and help them if they don’t have big experience with software testing.

• the QA Analyst is the role dedicated for discussing testing related issues with the customer

• the QA Analyst can do the software demo for the customer

Benefits for our project team

• QA Analyst will lower the risk the customer will find a bug during his testing

• QA Analyst is the role dedicated for testing the solution - CE is a developer, he will not prepare test strategy and test cases, he can test but his time for testing will be always limited because testing is not his main job. So usually you can’t expect CE will test the solution the same way as QA Analyst.

• QA Analyst can lower the probability the customer will not be ready for UAT testing and we will discover this too late.

QA Tasks and Responsibilities

The following activities can be done by QA Analyst - if there is no QA Analyst on the project, they need to be done by CE, SA or PM

• communication with the customer about testing related issues (mostly during Feature Sprints and UAT)

  • is what the customer is reporting a bug or a change request?

  • did the customer understand the solution?

  • did the customer report everything necessary for retesting and understanding the issue?

• prepare and present sw demo for the customer (during Feature Sprints)

• retesting the fixed bugs and hand them over to the customer (mostly during Feature Sprints and UAT)

• explaining UAT testing basics to the customer (from kick-off meeting to Feature Sprints)

  • does the customer understand what is he responsible for?

  • give the customer examples of UAT test cases

  • check with the customer regularly he is getting ready for UAT

• bug administration in Jira (mostly during Feature Sprints and UAT)

  • hand over the bugs to CE (to be fixed) or to the customer (fixed and ready for retest)

  • checking the bugs in JIRA regularly - new ones, added comments,

  • prepare bug reports for stand-ups - list of current bugs, newly reported bugs, the most important bugs to solve