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What is a quality assurance software tester, and how is it differnt than a regular software tester?

I am interested in knowing the difference between the two. #technology

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Mohamed’s Answer

The testing world has a lot of terms for the activity that we undertake every day. You'll often hear the words QA, QC, and Test Engineering used interchangeably. While it is usually enough to get your point across with a developer, it is helpful to think about these terms and how they apply to the world of software testing. In the classic definition QC is short for Quality Control, a process of verifying predefined requirements for quality. In the terms of an assembly-line this might involve pulling manufactured units off at the end of the process and verifying different parts of the assembly process. For software the QC function may involve checking the software against a set of requirements and verifying that the software meets the predefined requirements.
Quality Assurance, on the other hand, is much more about providing the continuous and consistent improvement and maintenance of process that enables the QC job. We use the QC process to verify a product does what we think it does, and we use the QA process to give us confidence that the product will meet the needs of customers. To that end the QA process can be considered a meta process that includes aspects of the QC process. It also goes beyond that to influence usability and design, to verify that functionality is not only correct, but useful.
Here at Google, we tend to take a third approach that we call Test Engineering. We look at this as a bridge between the meta world of QA and the concrete world of QC. Our approach allows us to ensure that we get the opportunity to think about customers and their needs, while we still provide results that are needed on day to day engineering projects.
Our teams certainly work with Software Engineers in QA and QC roles, but we also work with teams to ensure that a product is testable, that it is adequately unit tested, and that it can be automated even further in our teams. We often review design documents and ask for more test hooks in a project, and we implement mock objects and servers to help developers with their unit testing and to allow our teams to test components individually.
We put an emphasis on building automated tests so that we can let people do what people are good at, and have computers do what computers are good at. That doesn't mean that we never do manual testing, but instead that we do the "right" amount of manual testing with more human-oriented focus (e.g. exploratory testing), and we try to ensure that we never do repetitive manual testing.

Thank you comment icon Thank you for the excellent answer. Justin
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Frank’s Answer

There really is no difference other than perhaps role. QA testers are generally associated with quality. Both do V&V. My advice, if you go this path, learn to program and be able to do both manual and automated test.

Thank you comment icon Thank you for the great advice. Justin
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Mark’s Answer

Honestly not much of a difference, perhaps a QA software tester focuses on the long term quality of a product, digging in to the requirements provided by business stakeholders, defects or bugs they report won't be exclusive to functional errors, but can also be features or designs that don't match the requirements. A software tester's primary focus is on the functionality of the product, making sure all the features work as expected, not so much caring whether it appeases business stake holders. For example if you tested a beta or alpha version of a video game or product, your verifying that the product behaves as you would expect it to, as a consumer, you are a software tester.
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Lakshmi’s Answer

There is no difference, but in current world, if you would like to go in this field, learn QA methodology and automation, so that you can do both manual and automation.
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Hanish’s Answer

As QA tester you'll test the software for bugs and report these bugs to the developers and as a software tester you'll write tests and automation for the software. As a QA tester you wont write any testcases, you just test the software for bugs and as a software tester you will write test cases for your programs and also implement automation testing in your code.
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Robyn’s Answer

Not really a difference...
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Rajeev’s Answer

As mentioned by other people there are no difference, it is just different companies, in different domain they are called differently. Essentially all of them primary responsibility is to test and maintain the quality of software
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Kelly’s Answer

Hi Justin. do you play video games? Ever hear of a beta? a Quality control tester would be an Alpha tester. Someone who tests the product before you the consumer get to try it. I used to do both Alpha and Beta testing , both are looking for problems in the software before they sell it to the public. Most of the time a software will go thru multiple kinds of testing before it ever reaches the public. Sometimes to fix issues on how it works with other programs. ( xbox or playstations systems or Windows etc) Sometimes to fix things on how it is suppose to work. There really is no regular software tester, but many different tests that are run and what you test is dependent on where in the software you are working. The easiest way to explain it... you get paid for breaking it so the developers can fix it.
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Irina’s Answer

There is absolutely no difference between quality assurance software tester and software tester. In our role, the positions are often called a bit differently. Some other options you may see are: functional tester, manual tester, quality engineer, sqa engineer and others.
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