Tell me more ×
Software Quality Assurance & Testing Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for software quality control experts, automation engineers, and software testers. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote 0 down vote favorite

I was looking at a platform experience engineer job opening and I was wondering how that was different from a qa engineering position? Is it just qa for a platform rather than a product?

share|improve this question
3  
That is not a common term. Given what your website says, I assume you are referring to the platform experience engineering position at Apple. Is that the position you are asking about? – user246 Aug 24 '12 at 19:10
@user246 Yes that is the position I'm referring to though the best resource I've found is from MSDN blogs.msdn.com/b/livemesh/archive/2008/04/22/… – Steve Moser Aug 24 '12 at 19:55
2  
It is possible that Microsoft and Apply might use that term in different ways. In any case, I think Apple HR would be the best place to ask your question. – user246 Aug 24 '12 at 21:27

closed as too localized by user246, Suchit Parikh, corsiKa♦ Oct 31 '12 at 21:41

This question is unlikely to help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet. For help making this question more broadly applicable, see the FAQ.

2 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

As with all positions the title means whatever the hiring company wants it to mean, nothing more.

The term "QA Engineer" might mean "Tester", "Standards Enforcer", "Auditor", "part-time Developer/Analyst", all of these, or none of these. I've seen them all. In my company, the team used to consist of "QA Engineers", until we were purchased by a larger corporation. Now we are "QA Analysts". Our role hasn't changed, just the titles.

The same might be true of "Platform Experience Engineer". It probably means something like "a person who checks to see if our applications conform to our standards for platform experience". Or perhaps not.

Check with the hiring company and with the job posting. Often the stated requirements give you some clues.

share|improve this answer
up vote 1 down vote

The term itself is kind of subjective without more context. In your link you refer to Live Mesh and since someone felt the need to explain (although not very clearly) what a platform experience is it might be an indication how subjective it is.

Wikipedia has a definition to the term experience design which may be a new or more prominent consideration in technology these days.

Depending on what platform experience is there may be some overlap with software testing but it's hard to say for sure.

share|improve this answer

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.