Well, this was unexpected. For the past 5 months, I have been in QA and Automation. As a profession, not that titles matter, but I have been a QA Enablement Software Engineer and an Automator—that’s a mouthful. I will unpack what that means and what my sole responsibility is in a company.

When I joined the company I am at now, just before we started working, I was given the choice to choose a mentor and join their domain. I chose QA and automation (without knowing why because I chickened out of UI Dev). I then started training on how to automate using Java and Selenium. I did 3 types of testing and automation; API testing (backend), mobile app and web testing with Selenium and Appium.

What is Quality Assurance Enablement?

The position I am in is not fully QA. It’s a mixture of Software Engineering, QA, and Automation. We basically develop, govern, sign off, and create procedures for software enrollment.

We create frameworks that have CI/CD integration; they run test executions on pipelines; there’s DevOps included.

We create rules and procedures that QAs use when doing their work. We do an official sign-off to production when a new feature has been created and tested for quality. That includes automation, functional testing, behavioral testing, data testing, and performance testing. If one of the items is faulty, we decline a sign off and the developers have to fix the issue. Then a regression is run.

In simple terms, we create tools and procedures for QAs to use and make their lives easier.

How has it been

I won’t lie. It’s been quite a journey already. It teaches a person about clean and efficient software. I came to learn that QAs are the foundation of the company’s image. They’re the ones who make sure that the software delivered to the users is perfect and efficient. Yes, I know developers do write code for the company.

Here’s a fun fact: Did you know that testing a feature takes twice as long as developing it? Being a QA is not easy. A lot of things go into QA. I barely touched the surface of it.

In the upcoming blogs, I will be writing about clean code and design patterns. Stay tuned.