QA engineer, where to start?

Question

Software testing

Hello!
A long time ago, I had the idea to try myself as a qa engineer, but somehow everyone did not get around to studying this issue. Namely, where to start a junior, what he should know, what to be able to do, where to acquire the necessary skills and practice, and in general, where to start building a career in testing.
Input:
it education elementary level
technical English
C# (probably a little more ("hello world")
curiosity

Answer 1

First , let's understand what is QA? This concept is rather abstract, and in the CIS it is often used in a different sense than in more distant lands.
QA is product quality assurance, ideally at all stages of development.
The very first thing that a QA Engineer will have to deal with in most cases is functional testing.
Writing tests for tasks and passing these tests., passing already written ones, updating, introducing bugs and so on. In this case, QA Engineer = Tester. For this, the most important thing is a well-functioning head, the ability to read problems and ask the right questions: "What if so? What if that way?"
Depending on the product, additional skills are required -> the web has its own specifics, the mobile has its own, the software has its own, the hardware has its own. Well, and, accordingly, a basic understanding of the code, working with the database, and so on - will also be needed from time to time.
But, the quality assurance process does not end with functional testing, so the concept of QA is broader than testing. Here we are moving away from banal tests on functional requirements and moving on to requirements analysis and documentation (search for bottlenecks in requirements and implementation), usability testing (search for "jambs" in interfaces and functionality), performance testing, and so on.
A separate part is test automation. Here, things vary from company to company, and the role of an autotester varies from "a tester who has learned how to use a test framework" to "a full-fledged developer who automates what the testers tell him."
The requirements differ accordingly.
In addition, a good QA engineer also works on the development process itself. Our goal is to ensure the quality of the product, and if it suffers due to jambs in the workflow, they must also be identified and resolved.
It seems to me that a QA engineer is a tester who has gone beyond testing in his work. Who works on the quality of the product not only in terms of "Requirements met - ready for production", but tries to make the product better in all respects, first of all - for business, secondly - for the user, thirdly - for those who make this product .
Therefore, I believe that the QA path is best to start with testing (by the way, in Russia, the concepts of QA and testing are almost always identical in the minds of non-testers).
What is important for a tester?
It's also worth getting ready to say a lot "no, it won't work" to managers and developers.
Well, in general, come to terms with the fact that other parties to the process are very often ready to act at the expense of quality.
1) an idea of ​​the development process. Stages when it's time to test and all that.
2) an idea of ​​writing tests: what is a test plan, test suite, test case, test step, Definition of Done, Expected result, etc.
3) an idea of ​​what a defect is: Severity and Priority of defects, what are they; what the description of the defect consists of, and all that.
4) at least a general idea of ​​test design: what is it, why is it needed, what are the practices.
5) Basic SQL skills - select, update, work with multiple tables and all that.
And they also want a person to be able to think. Be ready for logic puzzles (which are bullshit and unnecessary) and puzzles like "There is a window with a button that sends a request: write test cases" or "Test the pencil."
Something like this.
Unfortunately, he talked more about testing than about QA in general. :)

Answer 2

A QA engineer is a programmer in the testing department. This is the same programmer who knows the database and so on, but also all sorts of unit tests, TDD and other testing methodologies.
spb.hh.ru/vacancy/7429509 here is a typical description.

Answer 3

Great! And when you are asked how to get to a certain street, you must answer, this is the same street, only houses of a different color, and there is a newsstand.
And let them kick me in the face, but not every coder is a programmer, and as far as I can imagine programming is used to automate testing, and for automation, judging by the vacancy, experience in functional testing is still required, and SQL selects are not yet all the SQL that I By the way, I forgot to mention in my skills.
PS
If it's not right, kick it painfully, but constructively, so that you learn and get rid of darkness.