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Lately I have been looking for a new position in the QA world. My background, while short, has afforded me amazing learning opportunities and I feel it is time for me to take a leap and learn even more. The issue I am having is that while I love my QA role, my experiences is extremely varied from more than just QA and closer to a PM/BA/QA/Dev/Everything. In a previous role, I was one of 2 people in the company that actively worked on the project so I had to wear every hat possible. Another company did the Dev/PM/BA work.

My experiences with this project include:

  • White Hat Hacking
  • Developing testing plan and Strategy
  • Thoroughly documented all testing in production, Adhoc testing in Test
  • Assisted accounting with reporting and verification
  • Developed training materials and conducted seminars
  • Developed requirements and wrote stories
  • Determined minimal requirements required to launch into production, refocused development team to these requirement in order to successfully launch on time
  • Assisted with initial launch (Hardware set up, Software set up, Network set up, On-site support)
  • Demonstrated project to executives
  • Prioritized new requirements and backlog
  • Acted as systems admin prelaunch, during launch and post launch
  • Mastered the software and was the overall resident expert, AKA the 'go to guy'

While I believe these experiences as a whole has made me a lot better in QA. I am curious as to which of these are actually a commonplace part of the QA role?

Note: Since leaving that role with that company (they went bankrupt), I have since played a more standard QA role. Test planning, test case writing, test automation, testing tools development, testing in general. I mainly want to know which of these would be beneficial and which may be harmful for my resume. Since I only have the 1 company to compare with, I am not sure what applies.

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    Well, you role is more like PM in small companies, where PMs are not managing the project and development the team, and verifying its output before presenting it to executives.
    – dzieciou
    Mar 19, 2014 at 14:03

2 Answers 2

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You described intersting experience but I believe every engineer must do what he desired to do. I am working in huge company and we have accurately separated responsibilities. QA do QA job, IT department do their job and etc. But I was responsible for many tasks which are not related directly to my position in previous job. Anyway your wide experience will be useful, no doubts. There are common QA roles in company:

  • Test planning and risk analysis
  • Review specs, design and requirements
  • Review existing tests
  • Test case creation
  • Executing test cases
  • Source code verification
  • Automation testing if needed
  • Performance testing
  • Reports
  • Bugtracking
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"Universal" is such a tough term to discuss. The good testers I have seen have qualities such as technical proficiency (to the extent needed for the job), a natural curiosity, good communication skills, and a toughness of concentration to quickly uncover an underlying defect once an anomaly is observed.

I have moved on to a more "developer" role now from a tester role and the comments I get are that I appear more willing to take on new, beta frameworks and processes while having an "aggressive curiosity" about my work. (All meant as compliments. :) )

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