What is QA Team - Quality Assurance Team Structure, Roles And Responsibilities

Dinesh Thakur

19 Aug 2024

Software quality is always a challenge, and the Quality assurance team is a key to tackle this challenge. Quality assurance is a process that involves carefully evaluating a system using established testing procedures to make sure that the end product meets demanding quality standards. 

According to Wikipedia, quality assurance is “a way of preventing mistakes or bugs and avoiding problems in software development". QA team conducts through tests to identify software issues/bugs at early stages. Rigorous testing ensures a high-quality product that meets user expectations.

If you want to better understand the QA team, QA team structure, their roles and responsibilities, then you are at the right place.

Let’s get started.

What Is Quality Assurance in Software?

Quality Assurance in software is all about ensuring that software meets the highest standards of quality. It covers a variety of activities designed to make sure that the processes, procedures, and standards used in software development are suitable and efficiently implemented.

Quality assurance team operates alongside software development, aiming to improve the development process. The main objective is to detect and resolve any possible concerns before they develop into significant issues. SQA acts as an umbrella activity that spans the entire software development lifecycle, continuously promoting and ensuring quality at every stage.

Why Is QA Important?

Whether your product is B2B or B2C, user experience is crucial to its success. For enterprise software, businesses need solutions that can streamline processes and enhance productivity. Software that is slow, inefficient, or full of bugs won’t provide value to an organization. Quality assurance plays a vital role in ensuring end users are satisfied and the application performs all necessary functions as expected.

Bugs are an unavoidable part of software development. However, discovering them too late in the process can create chaos, leading to delays and rushed fixes that disrupt developers' schedules and drain resources. Implementing organized testing processes and a clear test strategy helps catch bugs early, allowing you to allocate resources effectively and prevent costly last-minute fixes. By ensuring thorough testing, QA helps maintain a seamless user experience and ensures the software delivers real value to the organization.

What is a QA Team?

A quality assurance team ensures that quality standards are met through careful planning, observation, and evaluation. Building a reliable QA team involves setting clear standards and procedures, defining precise job roles, and hiring skilled team members to achieve these goals. By fostering consumer trust and staying ahead of the competition with superior products, QA teams contribute to the development of high-quality products. This, in turn, helps establish long-term, mutually beneficial business relationships, making it easier to maintain and grow these connections over time.

What Does a QA Team Do in Software Development?

The main role of quality assurance (QA) in software development is to ensure that your software works as intended and meets all the criteria outlined in the software requirements specification (SRS) document. QA specialists perform both manual and automated testing to identify bugs before they can cause major problems, which are then recorded in a bug-tracking system like Jira or ClickUp for the development team to address. They review test documentation, create a detailed test plan and test cases, select the right testing tools, and set up the test environment for finding bugs. After fixing the issues, the testing cycle begins again.

To make well-informed decisions in software projects, both project managers and clients need timely updates about the software’s status. QA provides this crucial information, however, the timing of a software release is ultimately decided by the customer, not the QA team. Some clients may decide to launch a product with known bugs if the potential benefits, like gaining a competitive edge or delivering a critical feature, outweigh the risks. In such cases, the QA team’s role is to identify, document, and prioritize these bugs, ensuring that the client is fully informed to make the best decision.

 Quality assurance goals, among other things, include providing this information at any given period along the software project timeline. It’s worth mentioning, however, that quality assurance engineers do not choose the best time for a software solution to go live. Instead, it’s the customer who makes the final decision. Having consulted the QA team, a client may even decide to roll out a software solution containing documented bugs and errors! For instance, you can make such a decision when the time frame for releasing your product is relatively tight and the tradeoff between the reward — i.e., outpacing the competition or enabling a critical feature — is larger than the risk of launching it with minor bugs. Either way, you need to detect, document, and prioritize these bugs, and that’s also one of your QA team’s goals.

How Does QA Team Work?

To understand what to expect from your software testing team, here are some key responsibilities they handle:

Requirements Analysis

Before diving into testing or planning, it's essential for the QA team to thoroughly understand the client's expectations for the product. This involves reviewing business requirements to ensure alignment between the product owner and its future users.

Test Planning

This stage involves dynamic brainstorming sessions, roundtable discussions, and thorough research with all key team members.

Testing Documentation

It helps track progress, keeps everyone updated on the project status, and quickly brings new team members up to speed. Testing documentation ensures that all aspects of the testing process are well recorded and easily accessible.

Test Cases Execution

This includes identifying and reporting errors, setting up a secure testing environment, suggesting performance improvements, verifying fixes, and providing technical oversight throughout the bug lifecycle. 

Quality Assurance Team Structure - Different Roles And Responsibilities

Quality assurance team roles and responsibilities differ from project to project and company to company due to the project scope, size, job titles, testing methodologies, and technologies. Nevertheless, some roles are typically present in almost every testing team, such as:

• QA Lead
• Team Lead
• UI/UX Test Engineer, Manual Test Engineer, Automated Test Engineer
• Network Test Engineer
• Test Library and Configuration Specialist
• Tester

Here is the complete breakdown of roles and responsibilities of a QA team:

What Are The Responsibilities Of QA?

QA does more than just test software—it involves a range of critical activities to ensure quality. Beyond thorough testing of the app or website, QA focuses on:

• Test Planning: It involves defining the objectives of testing and determining the approach for meeting test objectives.
• Test Strategy: Involves developing a test strategy that aligns with the project requirements and schedules.
• Early Testing: Eliminates the defects at an early stage and reduces the bug fixing cost and time.
• Executing Tests: Involves appropriate techniques (manually or by using test execution tools) and documenting testing failures.
• Analysis: Involves thorough analysis of the defects and identifies the root cause.
• Troubleshooting: It involves resolving defects so that it does not affect the product quality.
• Reporting: QA reports defects to software developers by recording software defects with a bug-tracking system. QA also informs the test progress against a schedule of the quality management.
• Communication: It involves interacting with BA, project manager, software development team, and client as per need. QA also conducts different test procedures, reports issues, and follows up on the status of the issues.
• Collaboration: QA collaborates with the software testing team to assess or diagnose problems and suggest possible solutions.
• Monitoring: QA monitors and analyzes the performance using tools for efficient and problem-free operations. They also uncover vulnerabilities in the system and determine that its data and resources are protected from intruders.
• Test Summary: QA provides a test summary report that reflects the software under the test’s top-notch quality. QA also manages the entire testing activity with different test management tools.

FAQs

What is a Quality Assurance Analyst Responsible For?

A Quality assurance analyst is responsible for:

• Analyzing Requirements
• Creating and Executing Test Plans and Test Cases
• Monitoring and Maintaining Existing Tests
• Providing Reports
• Participating in Project-Level Meetings
• Collaborating and Communicating

Which Work Areas Does Quality Assurance Cover?

QA testers ensure the overall quality of a project. Right from the start of the project, the team comes together to gather all the required information and carefully examine these requirements to gain a deep understanding of the project.

A QA tester is responsible for test planning, test development, test environment and data setup, test execution and reporting. The QA team is also responsible for managing test maintenance and reports generation at every stage of development.

When Do You Need a QA Team?

Typically, many projects bring in their QA team towards the end, when the software is almost complete, and the project enters the testing phase. This approach, though common in the basic SDLC, often results in increased risks, higher costs, and extended timelines.

However, involving QA early in the development process can identify issues sooner, allowing developers to address them promptly. As a result, by the time the final product is ready for testing, there are fewer problems to fix, significantly reducing the risks, costs, and overall project timeline. This proactive approach ensures a smoother development process and a higher-quality end product.

What Tools QA Team Uses?

The QA team uses a variety of tools to ensure comprehensive testing and high-quality software. Some of the common tools include test management tools (Jira, TestRail, QA Touch), bug tracking tools (Bugzilla, Mantis, Redmine), test automation tools (Selenium, QTP/UFT, Appium, Cypress), performance testing tools (JMeter, LoadRunner, Gatling), continuous integration tools (Jenkins, CircleCI, Travis CI), collaboration and communication tools (Slack, Microsoft Teams) code quality tools (SonarQube, CodeClimate) and more.