The Adaptability Of A QA Engineer

What Is Adaptation

Adaptation is the ability of a person to adapt to changing conditions. Including if he changes his activities. For example, when a manual manager decides to move to automation or a UI Automator decides to move to REST.

I had to adapt when I moved from UI and REST automation to automation and testing of OpenStack. OpenStack is a platform that allows you to get a virtual machine, a Kubernetes cluster, a database, or even a whole cluster of them with one click. The topic is interesting, but an OpenStack testing community has yet to exist.

Adaptation can be compared to evolution – problems can always be solved in several ways. By choosing the right one, you not only complete the task and develop but also save the most valuable resource – time.

An adaptable specialist can quickly adapt to the best solutions to a problem – even if he has not encountered this before. He can quickly change the field of activity: move from automation to development and vice versa.

What It Takes To Learn To Adapt

The ability to adapt depends on many factors and the skills of the QA engineer, but it all boils down to motivation and flexibility of mind.

Motivation is the most important thing. Most professionals do testing for money. There need to be more specialists in this profile on the market, so sometimes testers-automation earn even more than developers.

Salary should be a nice bonus, not an end in itself. QA engineers motivated by the love of testing develop faster and can reach the top of their profession within five years.

The flexibility of the mind allows you to adapt to different tasks. To achieve this, you need to develop in all directions:

• communicate with developers;
• learn new frameworks;
• try new approaches;
• understand business processes, and so on.

For a versatile person, those things that lead others into a stupor may seem obvious. In this regard, purposeful working out of all situations, even uncomfortable ones, helps – you go into them consciously to learn how to find a way out of them. The main thing is that you can get experience from them.

There are more specific things that are needed to learn how to adapt.

Pattern Search

Every process has a pattern that repeats itself. For example, you can draw parallels between development and testing and the coffee scheme:

• Backend developers can be compared to coffee farmers and processors.
• Front-end developers are roasters and baristas because the result of their work can be felt right in your circle.
• Q-graders (specialists in assessing the quality of coffee), like QA engineers, usually no one sees, but they know the process best of all. With them, many errors will appear, and the quality of the product will stay the same.

Knowledge and conditions are dynamic, and patterns remain unchanged, so when observing different areas, you need to pay attention to them.
A good example is the Wright brothers. They studied the birds in minute detail and then applied their behaviour patterns, which helped them successfully complete the first flight.

Also Read: Common Queries All You Need To Know About IT Workforce