What does a Quality Assurance Professional do?
A Quality Insurance Professional identifies product defects before they move from the development phase to the production phase, which can help your company preserve its reputation. Finding defects during the development process ensures that your company doesn’t spend money to manufacture products that don’t work as expected.
If you operate in an industry that relies on grant funding, a Quality Assurance Professional can also help you qualify for grants and comply with each grantor’s requirements.
Quality Assurance skills and qualifications
A successful Quality Assurance candidate has a combination of skills and qualifications. Attention to detail can help a QA professional identify defects quickly. It’s helpful for a QA professional to demonstrate proficiency in explaining QA processes and training new employees to follow them. You might also benefit from hiring a Quality Assurance Professional with experience using databases to track product defects.
Typical Quality Assurance skills and qualifications include:
- Proficiency in testing methods such as functional testing, regression testing, usability testing or automated testing, depending on the industry
- Experience using quality management systems (QMS) or defect tracking tools like JIRA, TestRail or Bugzilla
- Familiarity with version control platforms such as Git, especially for software QA roles
- Understanding of industry-specific quality standards, such as ISO 9001, Six Sigma, GMP (Good Manufacturing Practices) or FDA regulations
- Ability to write or interpret test cases, quality checklists or standard operating procedures (SOPs)
- Strong collaboration skills, including the ability to work closely with developers, engineers or operations teams to resolve quality issues
- Basic scripting or programming knowledge (e.g., Python, JavaScript or Bash) for QA automation or software testing
Analytical mindset, attention to detail and problem-solving skills for identifying root causes, spotting patterns and minimizing defect rates over time
Quality Assurance experience requirements
The amount of experience required for Quality Assurance roles varies based on your company’s needs. Providing on-the-job training gives you an opportunity to train the new hire to follow your company’s preferred processes and procedures.
If you need someone who can start testing products immediately, consider hiring a candidate with experience in manufacturing, software development or another discipline related to your company’s products.
Quality Assurance education and training requirements
If you need a Quality Assurance Professional, using skills-first hiring can be beneficial, as it’s possible to learn testing and documentation procedures on the job. Some candidates also have experience that can help them identify product defects with a high level of accuracy.
For senior roles, you might want to hire a candidate with relevant technical certifications or experience using the Scrum framework for software development, if that’s what your company uses.
Quality Assurance salary expectations
The average salary for a Quality Assurance Professional in the United States is $27.10 per hour, according to data from Indeed Salaries. However, QA salaries can vary based on your company, location and the candidate’s experience.
Quality Assurance salary expectations
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Common salary:
27.48 HOURLY -
Typical salaries range from
7.25 -66.80 HOURLY - Find more information on Indeed Salaries
*Indeed data –
Job description samples for similar positions
If this Quality Assurance job description isn’t exactly what you need, here are some job descriptions for similar positions:
Quality Assurance job description FAQs
How does Quality Assurance differ from Quality Control?
Quality Assurance focuses on preventing defects, while Quality Control often focuses on identifying defects. A Quality Assurance Professional works to improve development and production processes, preventing errors caused by poor design, inadequate testing and human error. Quality Control Professionals inspect and test finished products to identify defects. For example, an auto factory might hire a Quality Control Professional to inspect tires for signs of material contamination.
What technologies does a QA professional use regularly?
A QA professional uses specialized tools for testing products and tracking bugs. You might want to look for a candidate with experience using Zephyr, TestRail, JUnit or Selenium for testing management. It can also be helpful to hire a Quality Assurance Professional who knows how to use Bugzilla or Jira to track development bugs.
How can a QA team improve customer satisfaction and retention?
A strong QA team improves customer satisfaction by preventing defective products from reaching your customers. This can reduce frustration and give customers more confidence in your company’s offerings. A comprehensive QA program might also give your company a competitive advantage, making it easier to attract customers who make repeat purchases.
How do I measure the effectiveness of our Quality Assurance team?
You can measure the effectiveness of your QA team by tracking relevant performance indicators. Common metrics include defect detection rate, time to resolution and defect leakage rate. Defect detection rate measures the total percentage of defects found during a testing cycle.
Time to resolution is the amount of time it takes to identify a defect, determine the root cause and fix the issue. Defect leakage rate measures the number of defects that aren’t identified during testing.
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