Do you hear the term “Quality Assurance” all the time? Do you wonder what exactly it is?

Are you curious about what will it be like to be a Quality Assurance Engineer at NashTech? Do you want to explore the career roadmap for this job?

Let’s find out more!

What is Quality Assurance?

Quality is an attribute of a product or service and is achieved through a process, which is the set of activities that is performed to produce a product or a service.

QA focuses on improving processes to ensure that organizations deliver qualified/good products/services to customers. Once processes are consistent, there is the assurance that quality with the same level will be incorporated into any product or service produced by that process.

As such, software quality assurance (SQA) aims to assure software engineering processes, activities and work items are monitored and comply with the defined standards, which typically are the CMMI model, ISO 9000, ISO 9001, ISO15504, etc.

Quality assurance vs. Quality Control

Quality products and services mean that they are defect-free and meet certain requirements and customers’ needs. And both quality control (QC) and quality assurance (QA) are aspects of quality management. While of the two, quality assurance is more important, these two terms are often used collaterally. However, although some quality assurance and quality control activities are interrelated, there are distinct differences between the two concepts.

Source: http://www.theagilityedge.com/agilityblog/2009/11/quality-control-and-quality-assurance

Quality assurance at NashTech

Like any other role at NashTech, there is a transparent yet flexible career development path for Quality Assurance Engineers, which is illustrated below:

At each level, there are specific requirements which vary from project to project, the general qualifications for Quality Assurance jobs at NashTech can be listed as:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science
• Good English skills
• Knowledge of CMMI, AGILE, SCRUM, KANBAN
• Understand other Quality Management Systems (ISO, TQM, ITIL …)
• CSQA certificate is a plus
• Diagnostic and problem-solving skills
• Technical aptitude to quickly learn new software products
• Able to understand, and convey, the Developers and the Customers viewpoints
• Strong communication skills, be good at documenting work, and must be able to work well with different groups

What the expert says?

To understand more about what it will be like to do Quality Assurance at NashTech, we had a chat with Ms. Ly Vo, our Quality Assurance Manager. According to Ms. Ly, if you have experience in the IT field, especially in software development in any position such as developer, business analyst, project manager, or quality control, it would be a plus for you to pour yourself into the quality assurance path.

Besides, a good Quality Assurance Engineer (QAE) is also someone who acquires these qualifications:

1. Optimal goal is quality: QAE will need to be keen on enhancing quality as if you are enhancing your personal reputation.
2. Research more: Doing extra research on quality standards and requirements of the industry you are working in, to reinforce the fundamental knowledge as well as acquire new one, isvital . For example, if you are a QAE in software development, what are the quality standards of a software? Customers tend to use a software because it meets their needs, defect-free and the functions are easy to use. As such, having a strong background in IT is a must if you are a Software Quality Assurance Engineer.
3. Be a team player AND a consultant: Ms. Ly emphasized that a good quality assurance professional is someone who not only attains strong knowledge in improving processes’ quality but is also a good team player. Supporting, consulting colleagues, sharing knowledge, tips or even defects, should all be taken into account. By doing these, processes and outputs with highest quality will be optimized and assured.

Ms. Ly also shared some additional aspects on doing quality assurance at NashTech. At the company, talents will be trained and provided with more understanding and practical knowledge about software development processes, which is lacking from most Vietnamese universities’ education programs. The training program at NashTech will last for at least two months and later, talents will be guided to practice for six months in order to fully understand the quality management system. While working at NashTech, talents will also have opportunities to learn and gain deep knowledge in a broad spectrum, including project management, analysis, architecture, testing, implementation, etc.

With the goal of becoming an expert in quality assurance, Ms. Ly emphasized that QA professionals at NashTech need to continuously learn from real projects and the surrounding environment, adapting to the latest business trends in order to efficiently evaluate the current processes as well as design any potential new ones. From that, we can assure that the process and its outputs will meet our own as well as clients’ standards and requirements.

Eager to know more about what QA professionals talk about their journey of doing quality assurance at NashTech? Let’s take a look at the article about Toan Nguyen, Quality Assurance of the Year 2020.