Soft skills are equally important as technical skills if you want to become a successful Software Quality Assurance Engineer. During day-to-day work, they can help you to communicate effectively, collaborate with team members, and approach problems with a critical and creative mindset.
Here are some soft skills that every QA professional should have to be more successful in this role:
Effective Communication and Collaboration
When you work as a QA, you need to ask questions, talk about requirements and scenarios, present your findings, report bugs, and collaborate with developers, product owners, project managers, and other stakeholders. You need to have communication skills to collaborate with all of these stakeholders to understand all the requirements, to ask questions about all the things that are not clear, to share knowledge with the team members, to communicate the issues that you have found, etc.
Analytical Skills and Critical Thinking
As a QA, you always need to analyze the different things during your everyday work. For example, when you find a bug, you need to analyze that finding and think of what could cause that bug or what kind of impact on other functionalities could that bug have. When you are at the refinement meeting, you need to analyze the requirements and think about the possible scenarios. When you are writing some test cases, you need to analyze the product to make optimized and complete tests. When you execute some automation test suite you need to analyze the report, make comparisons with previous reports, etc. As a QA you should always be focused on analysis, critical thinking, question assumptions, and consider alternative viewpoints.
Adaptability
The IT industry is constantly changing, there are always some new tools, new methodologies, new ways of working, etc. In such a fast-paced environment it is important to be able to quickly adapt and learn. Also, when you work on a project, the requirements, priorities, and deadlines can change, so it is a very useful skill if you can adapt quickly.
Empathy
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. As a QA, you need to develop positive relationships and collaboration within the team. You are working in a team, and teamwork is very important in this job. Never blame anyone when you find a bug or missing requirement. You are a team and the whole team is working as one.
Also, it is important to understand the customers and it is a good practice to put yourself in the users’ shoes to better understand their experience and expectations. With that, you will be able to make tests that will bring high-quality products and the best possible experience for end-users.
Time Management
The QA needs to have time management skills to be able to prioritize tasks, meet deadlines, and ensure that testing activities are completed efficiently. To be able to create a test plan, to prioritize the tasks, and to manage to finish the testing activities is a part of effective time management and it is very important, especially in a fast-paced development environment.
Curiosity
The QA needs to be curious and want to explore, ask questions, and seek a deeper understanding of how things work. This is very important for conducting thorough testing and for bringing high-quality products to the customers. The QA should also be creative and curious when doing exploratory testing, where it is possible to discover hidden bugs and vulnerabilities.
