What Dev expects from QA

You may be a great QA and have great eye and you can be great internally, but do you know what a developer or the development team expects from you as QA ? I'll try to explain here what I think and what I have lived and experienced.

Developers, most of the time are focused on their stuff, on deliver things and code things to deliver, however, the developer will expect a lot of things from QA not only good quality or great testing skills, but also follow the process, be proactive, focus on delivery and be a key player and the person to go to on the project.

First of all, developers expect from you great testing skills, not only manual testing but all different types of tests that the project may require, you must test the whole stuff, test all requirements, test all user stories and functional areas including happy paths, edge cases, do a lot of exploratory testing and go beyond the requirements, as I said before, use cases or acceptance criteria is where the testing starts not where it ends. You as QA must identify risk areas of the system and areas where automation should take place, propose it and do it if you have the skills, make sure you identify which are the most critical areas to test too.

With the great testing skills comes up the good bug reporting, as I said in my previous post, you must log bugs correctly with all the data needed by the developer including: environment, steps, results, screenshots or videos, type of bug, severity and priority, I had seen in the past how developers get confused by some bugs logged incorrectly with missing steps, a misleading summary, a screenshot that doesn't correspond with what the bug is about, etc.

QA is not only in charge of testing, QA should be the gatekeeper of the process, so a developer will expect from you as a QA to be aware and make sure the process of the project is met in terms of deliveries, kanban board or Jira board visibility or management. You may think this is a responsibility of the PM and you may be right, however as a QA you should be aware of the board to raise risks about what tickets won't be finished for a certain sprint, a ticket was not estimated correctly, a ticket needs more information, etc.

Finally, along with following the process, great testing skills and awesome bug reporting, a developer expects from a QA great communication, not only written but also also spoken, developers expects from QA to be the person to go to in terms of doubts, missing stuff, usability and sometimes UX, you must have great communication with the whole team, give visibility, be the point of contact if needed between Dev and PO and between PM and PO, you may have never seen this, but that has happen to me in my experience. 

Perhaps you are already doing this or it seems to be so basic, but I have noticed a lot of QAs that are not meting all previous items, a great process can mean a success on the delivery and the quality of the project, I encourage you to do these things and if you are a manager or have people in charge, make sure your QAs are doing that too.

Next time I will talk about what QA expects from Dev.

@LuchoAgileQA