How to Become a QA Engineer

You’ve been there: that website or that app is supposed to be working and it’s just… not. At best, it’s frustrating — a site’s text might extend off the side of the page so you can’t see it. At worst, it can be a major interruption in your ability to access and use vital digital services — a log-in error on your doctor’s site can keep you from finding out the results of an important test.

It is the job of a quality assurance (QA) engineer to spot and tag those issues before they crop up for end users. That’s why companies are so keen on having good QA experts in their teams. The data backs up just how valuable these roles are:

• 40% of large companies spend over a quarter of their budget on testing.
• 10% more QA jobs will be created over the next nine years, outpacing the economy-wide growth rate by over 3x.
• 71.5% of organizations now bring testers into planning sessions from the very beginning, indicating a growing operating philosophy that prioritizes QA expertise in strategy.

Companies need QA testers, they’re going to need more of them in the future, and not only are they going to be pointing out bugs, they’re also going to be helping guide software development in general. With all that, you’re probably wondering how to become a quality assurance specialist. So let’s get into it.

Here’s the info that’ll help you figure out how to become a software tester.

What is a QA engineer?

QA engineer vs. QA tester

QA engineers typically take on higher-level tasks than QA testers. QA engineers come up with test strategies, write automated tests, and are more focused on the overall quality process at their organization so as to prevent bugs from cropping up in the first place. A QA tester, on the other hand, focuses on executing the tasks that the QA engineer sets up. They’re more hands-on within the testing process.

Note: Some companies may not follow this strict dichotomy. Our best advice is to read QA tester job descriptions closely — they’ll give you a sense of the actual responsibilities of the role better than the job titles themselves.

What does a quality assurance engineer do?

Quality assurance (QA) engineers plan, design, deploy, and execute tests to make sure that products meet quality standards. They collaborate with stakeholders to develop a testing strategy. Then, they help carry out that strategy by identifying and documenting bugs via manual and automated testing throughout the development lifecycle so the dev team can resolve errors. They play a crucial role in making sure the final product works and meets requirements.

Key responsibilities:

• Requirement analysis: Working with stakeholders to figure out what the product is supposed to do
• Test plan and design: Making a strategy for testing, and then crafting the tests that’ll be part of the strategy
• Bug detection and documentation: Finding issues in the product and documenting them for the dev team
• Process monitoring: Making sure that testing is keeping up with outlined structures
• Communication and collaboration: Staying in regular touch both with stakeholders and the dev team throughout the process for product updates and feedback on issues 

A day in the life of a QA Engineer 

To give you a sense of what someone in a QA role might do throughout the day, we’ve built out a mock schedule of tasks to illustrate what QA testing is and what you might expect from a job in this field. As a reminder, this is general — each job will have its own quirks and specifics.

Morning

Days in QA tend to start with check-ins of all sorts. First, people in QA might sit at their desk (in the office or at their home office) with their cup of coffee and check their emails as well as the bug tracking systems to see if anything’s happened overnight. Many companies have distributed workforces, so something that was reported the previous day might have been resolved overnight by someone on the dev team who’s located in another time zone.

There’s also typically a short morning meeting that’s known as a stand-up. The QA team will come together to share what happened the previous day, what they’re working on that day, try to mitigate blockers, and quickly discuss anything that needs people to come together face-to-face (even via videocall) to solve.

If they had time before the call, they might have verified that the fixes that came in overnight have addressed the issues reported the previous day. If not, they’ll typically tackle these checks after the stand-up. This might also include a basic test of the most important functions (think log-in, adding an item to the cart, opening the app or website) that’s known as a smoke test.

Following that, they may test new features, follow up on previous test cases, or do exploratory testing and find edge cases that need to be addressed.

Midday

Lunchtime. Yes, we’re including this in the schedule because the work of people in QA isn’t typically dependent on the exact hours they’re at work. Rather, what typically matters is getting their tasks done, and that is often up to the discretion of the people tackling those tasks. Just take it from Michael Reasoner, a TripleTen QA grad. He used to work a job that was draconian about his hours at work, but when he switched to QA, he found a much more humane approach to his schedule:

There's actual teamwork. There's actual camaraderie. If you have a doctor's appointment, they're not going to ask you, ‘Can you move it?’ Michael Reasoner, TripleTen grad

But we don’t want to give you unrealistic expectations, so even during lunch, QA engineers might also sometimes answer urgent questions from the dev team who need more clarification on the bugs reported, and sometimes teammates will also get in touch asking to verify that the bug they’ve spotted isn’t something local to them.

The point still stands, though: as a QA tester or engineer, you’re most likely going to have enough flexibility to step away for a quick refresh and a bite to eat.

Afternoon

After lunch, people in QA might get more focused on the actual meat of their work: digging into and documenting bugs. If they spotted anything significant in their morning checks, they might take screenshots, try to reproduce the error in other environments, and determine just how severe the bug is, i.e., will this keep people from buying a product (severe), or will this make a design element look wonky (less severe)? This will all be logged in a tracking system (Jira, for example), which will likely automatically escalate the ticket they make to the proper expert.

If they’re in QA automation, this might also be the time when people write or update the scripts that will test things that would be tedious or impossible for one human to manage alone, such as stress testing, during which requests in excess of what the system is designed to handle come in. One person can’t generate millions of requests, so a QA automation engineer will write a script that can.

There may also be discussions during this time. Developers may ask for more details about bugs, fellow QA workers might ask for help reproducing something they spotted, and there may even be meetings about future projects and testing approaches if the worker is on the strategic side of QA.

Late afternoon

Wrapping up the day, QA engineers and testers might run regression tests. These are verifications that the new code has left everything functional and hasn’t introduced any wild or unexpected new errors. If there are new bugs, people in QA follow the typical routine: documenting and reporting the issues as usual.

A day in QA will often end with setting up work for the morning: checking in on tickets in the tracking system to make sure everything’s as it should be, updating documentation, and planning out the tests to run or come back to when they return.

Of course, there’s going to be variation

Now, this is all for a typical day on a typical week. But things can change. For example, if you end up at a company developing a software product, depending on where a product is in its lifecycle, the focus of this work might shift. 

For example, at the planning stages, there’ll be more time spent discussing when, how, and which tests should be carried out. Then, as the product continues its development, this balance will shift more towards the actual testing side of things up until release week, which will likely be full of unexpected discoveries, regression testing, and all-hands-on-deck bug spotting and verification.

So even if the daily description might sound staid and static, there can indeed be significant dynamism within a QA role.

How to become a QA engineer

All right, so we have the details about what people in QA do. Now, to get to the next step and dig into how to get into QA testing in the first place. It’s a big topic, so let’s dive in.

What qualifications do you need to become a QA engineer?

There’s no one strict set of ingredients that’ll lead to a job in QA. It’s not a pound cake, after all; it’s a career. However, there are some basic quality assurance qualifications you’re going to need to have on your resume to convince hiring managers:

Education

Do you need a bachelor’s degree to land a QA career? Not at all. In fact, Eric Woodson landed his job without any degree whatsoever. However, he did go through the TripleTen QA Bootcamp, which gave him the know-how to land his new job in tech.

To become a QA engineer, you’re going to need to know what you’re doing, so education in the field is going to be necessary. You can start out gaining this using free resources such as YouTube tutorials, but as you get more serious about making the transition to QA, you’re going to need to likewise get more serious about your education. 

A bootcamp like TripleTen’s can give you the in-demand, up-to-date QA engineer skills that will serve you well in a QA career and help you stand out to recruiters.

Required QA engineering skills

QA skills, as you might imagine from our discussions above, can be quite diverse. For a general sense of the skills that help you architect a thriving career in the field, here’s a quick chart:

One quick note. We listed both manual testing and test automation above under hard skills because, all in all, these will indeed be the backbones of a future career in QA, but as we’ve mentioned, they each often shape unique career paths: manual QA and automated QA. The latter of these two paths will ask for a few more hard skills in scripting or coding, usually in JavaScript, Python, or Java. In addition, familiarity with test automation tools such as Selenium or Cypress will be valuable as well if you choose to go the automation route.

Which certification is best for QA?

The best QA tester certification to go for when you’re just starting out is the ISTQB certification. But that belies a reality in the industry, which is that, in all honesty, experience and robust portfolios do more to prove your capabilities than certifications do.

With professions like those in cyber security, certification is indeed important (even being required by some government agencies). However, when it comes down to it, QA is all about intentionally and wisely “breaking things,” as TripleTen grad Kyle Kolodziej put it, and then showing how and why things broke so they can be fixed. Certification is of course nice, but actual experience will more powerfully demonstrate you know how to do the things required of you.

As such, proving your capabilities with a portfolio of testing projects will do more for your career prospects than a quality assurance testing certification will. So if you want to get a career in QA fast, prioritize on learning the skills you need and then putting them into practice with projects you can then highlight to recruiters.

QA career path

But what will all those qualifications bring you to? Well, for a hint of inspiration, here’s what a potential QA career can look like (as well as the typical salaries you can expect from each role, sourced from Glassdoor as of the time of this writing).

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Entry/junior level: QA tester - $69,000 median pay

After you finish learning the skills and putting in work on projects to prove your bona-fides, you’ll most likely start out at the entry-level. At this stage, you’ll be doing what we’ve been discussing so far, only without the strategic input quite yet. You’ll be writing and running test cases, reporting and documenting bugs, and working with the dev team as they patch any of the spotted errors.

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Mid level: SDET (software development engineer in test) - $110,000 median pay

This is where you’ll start having a say in the strategy. You might not be guiding it yet, but you’ll add your expertise to strategy meetings. You’ll likely be mentoring junior testers, crafting frameworks, and designing test approaches for major features. In some cases, you might even take point for smaller teams on an ad-hoc basis.

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Senior level: QA tech lead - $134,000 median pay / Senior QA manager - $153,000 median pay

This is where a career might take a different course, depending on your interest and aptitude. If you want to dig into the tech side of things, you can become the QA tech lead, in which role you’ll, unsurprisingly, lead a team tackling testing for entire products or major features if the product is large and multifaceted enough. You’ll be making the bigger decisions about the strategy for these tests and contributing technical expertise across multiple teams working within your established strategy.

Alternatively, if you find yourself interested in and moved by people management, you might go for a management track. In this case, you’ll be still helping with QA strategy in many meetings, but your tasks will be more focused on overseeing a team of QA engineers. The technical expertise you’ve gained over your career will serve you well here, as you’ll be able to provide informed and valuable feedback, but you’ll also take on the responsibility of hiring new specialists, carrying out performance reviews, and making sure the teams you’re managing have the processes and infrastructure they need to succeed in their day-to-day work.

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Leadership level: Vice president of quality - $247,000 median pay

You’re executive-level now. For full transparency, not every company will have a VP of quality role, but many tech companies need someone at the highest level overseeing quality. In this position, you’re going to be launching and seeing to organization-wide initiatives that will improve QA processes at larger time scales. You’ll be directly working with the C-suite (e.g., CEO, COO, CTO) to bring attention to quality considerations when planning the major strategies that will shape the future of an organization. It’s a role of significant responsibility, but qualified QA leads and QA managers alike might find themselves advancing to this level.

QA engineer salaries

So you’ve got a bright future ahead of you. We do want to spend a little more time talking about salaries, though. What we listed above describes a potential path you can follow. It also assumed ambitions to achieve these higher positions, and not everyone is aspiring to that. So what might a QA engineer salary look like otherwise?

Once again, we’ll turn to Glassdoor. According to that site as of the time of this writing, the average QA engineer salary falls between $78,000 and $132,000. That covers all levels of experience and all locations, and if we change parameters, say we specify salary data to come from San Francisco, it hops to a range of between $108,000 and $179,000.

Then, there are a few quirks that come from job titles and the way that Glassdoor organizes data. For example, some QA engineers might focus their time on automation, but “automation” might not be in their titles. For those who do have that word in their titles, we see that the QA automation engineer salary data is slightly higher: $92,000 to $150,000.

So what does this mean for you? We can give you rough estimates, but you should also do some research on Glassdoor to enter salary negotiations with real information. When you know what people in your area are making for the exact job you’re going for (and at the same level of experience), you’ll have more power to push for the salary you deserve.

FAQ

Are QA jobs still in demand?

Yes, QA jobs are still in demand. In fact, according to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), employment in this field is expected to increase by 10% over the next nine years. It’s a simple equation: as software gets more and more important to our lives, companies are going to need more people to test that software.

Is QA engineering a good career?

Yes, QA engineering is a good career. First, according to the U.S. BLS, median annual wages for people in QA were $102,610, more than double the median for all occupations surveyed. In addition, because this industry is digital and task-focused, online QA tester jobs are out there for the taking, so there’s good work-life balance in this field.

Can I work in QA without a degree?

Yes, you can absolutely work in QA without a degree. As we mentioned above, Eric Woodson used new QA skills to make a transition into tech, and you can, too. QA, as a field, is more interested in the skills you have and less interested in whether you have an associate’s or bachelor’s degree.

Is becoming a QA engineer hard?

Becoming a QA engineer is often considered to be the easiest method of launching a career in tech. However, that shouldn’t be misconstrued as saying that the transition is effortless. You’re going to have to learn QA skills, and that takes real dedication and time. 

How long does it take to become a QA tester?

It takes five months to master the skills you’ll need to launch a QA career if you choose to enroll in TripleTen’s QA Bootcamp. Following that, you’ll have ten months of career guidance and assistance applying to jobs, and if you don’t land a career in QA, you’ll get your tuition refunded.

Do QA engineers need to code?

Some QA engineers need to code, specifically those in the subfield of automated QA. However, not everyone in QA works in automation. In fact, there’s an entire subfield of QA, manual QA, that doesn’t require workers to code whatsoever. All they need to know is how to test and how to document and track their findings.

Will AI replace QA jobs?

AI will change QA jobs; it will not replace them. There are already AI QA tools being developed, but they will need someone with knowledge of QA to implement them and use them. QA expertise will give you that know-how. Then, with these tools, you’ll be able to magnify what your QA expertise allows you to accomplish in a single day.

Is a QA job stressful?

Like any job, a job in QA can sometimes be stressful, but overall, it is not considered too strenuous. Before major releases, there may be intensive weeks, and it can be maddening to try to reproduce bugs that only occur under remarkably specific circumstances. And sometimes, you might not be sure you tested enough. But in general, QA is not a stress-riddled field.