QA (Quality Assurance) and SDET (Software Engineer in Test) Roles

Is there a difference between QA and SDET? Very few people would confirm negative. They are similar but not different. Quality Assurance belongs to the technical domain of software engineering and QA people are software engineers! Their context is different from other software engineers in the team. Some of them work in test automation, others jump into UI code or Site Reliability topics. Guess what? All of them work in the same team and have the same goal? How can a designation make a huge difference between the two of them? Let’s see what minor differences there are in the scope of QA and SDET people.

The battle of QA and SDET

What QA Engineer responsibilities are depends on the organization’s IT strategy. There are companies where QA performs manual testing and limited efforts are dedicated to test automation. Others put more focus on automation first. The typical role of QA belongs to:

• Understanding requirements and dependencies
• Discover bugs within system under test
• Write test cases
• Write automation test scripts, setup pipelines and automatic triggering
• Debug failed tests or piece of code

Everything above applies to both QAs and SDETs. The small thing that hardly belongs to the SDET scope is manual testing efforts (we all do some tests for something during the day, mostly manually). Even software engineers are performing manual tests during feature or piece of code development. Simply, that can’t be escaped. The mindset of both QA and SDET must be code first and manual testing should not become practice for QA and SDETs! Both QAs and SDETs spend their time on automation script development, taking care of pipeline health and deployment/delivery processes. They work closely with other peers in the team on improvements in all areas affected by the team. Daily impact is a team effort.

The shared role of QAs and SDETs, on a high level looks like this:

• Identify and develop test strategy and test scenarios
• Test the system applying testing techniques and tools
• Develop test automation scripts, tools and other functions to perform different levels and types of testing
• Implement test infrastructure and test execution strategies

Switching QA from manual practice to automation first approach should not be a long-lasting effort. If you are struggling to setup test automation or want to scale your QA, feel free to shoot an email.