If you're thinking about getting a job as a QA Manager, there are certain things you should be aware of as far as what the job will most likely require and what qualifications you will need to have in order to get such a job. A QA Manager's position can be very rewarding. It can also be very stressful. QA stands for quality assurance. This means that whatever product your company sells, you're responsible for making sure that the quality of the product itself is as high as possible and that there are no serious problems with the product. The importance of this job can't be shown any better than in the software industry. While the QA department is in no way responsible for actually creating the software that the company sells, they are responsible for testing the software. In doing so they have to test not only every single function of the software but every single combination of functions. For example, the copy and paste function of text editor may work fine in an isolated test. But it is quite possible that a bug can be discovered in the software if just prior to doing a copy and paste, the file save option is executed. Don't laugh. Stranger things have happened. The QA manager usually doesn't have much to do with the hands on testing of the software itself. The manager will probably have a team of QA testers. It is the manager's responsibility to assign each tester and certain module of the software to test and to instruct them to document each test and the result of each test so that they can be reviewed and sent to the programmers if any changes need to be made. It is also the responsibility of the QA manager, once all the fixes to the software have been done and the final tests are completed, to make sure that all documentation for the software is written up. The QA manager may do this alone or assign different parts of the documentation to be handled by different members of the QA staff. In order to perform the duties of a QA manager, the person has to have excellent analytical skills. They must be able to walk through a process, step by step and not leave anything out, much like how a programmer goes about doing his programming. A QA manager must also have very good communication skills. They must be able to communicate the needs of the program changes to the programmers and also be able to effectively communicate what needs to be tested to the rest of the staff. They also need to be able to write very well, especially for the purpose of completing the documentation needed for the software itself. Every QA manager position is going to be different as each company is going to have a different product. But the general overall concept is going to be the same regardless of what you're working on. A QA manager's position can be very rewarding in pay and in sense of accomplishment. It can also be a very long day more often than not. |
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