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Creating, executing, and maintaining reliable tests has never been easier.
It’s well established that the quality engineer has a wide-ranging mandate to support accelerating development cycles as well as ensure quality throughout the entire user experience. To fulfill that mandate, they need a diverse set of technical and soft skills that allows them to test complex software and advocate for the experience of every end-user. But continuously expanding one’s skill set is often easier said than done, especially when managing a growing workload.
Low-code tools have gained steam as software companies tackle this massive - and growing - need to nurture existing talent. Building upskilling into current workflows not only supports quality professionals looking to expand their quality engineering skills, but also sets the stage for how Roblox-obsessed Gen Z will use low-code to learn at work, eliminating the hard line between fluent coders and underrepresented technical talent. Low-code solutions designed specifically for quality engineering, such as test automation platforms, are essential for helping quality professionals build their careers, skills, and better software.
Low-Code Solutions Unlock Technical and Soft Skills for Quality Engineers
It’s easy to see how low-code test automation supports technical upskilling, but the benefits extend beyond helping software testers execute a greater range of automated tests. Advanced features like JavaScript snippets, in-depth reporting, and data-driven testing also enable quality engineers to enhance the collaboration and critical thinking capabilities that help them build cultures of quality.
Expanding the Quality Engineering Skill Set
The quality engineer: adaptable, analytical, and empathetic. Whether a quality professional is a veteran QA engineer, experienced manual tester, or new to the software quality field, low-code can help them grow essential skills for a successful quality career:
Manual and Automated Testing: mabl’s 2021 Testing in DevOps Report found that the most effective software testing organizations are harnessing the combined power of manual testing and test automation to maximize test coverage and ensure a delightful user experience. For manual testers just starting their automated testing journey, low-code solutions offer a much shallower learning curve than traditional high-code test automation frameworks. Rather than spending extra cycles trying to learn a test automation framework in addition to their regular responsibilities, low-code testing solutions enable manual testers to start creating tests in mere minutes. For those with experience automating tests, unified low-code test automation platforms make it simple to learn how to automate new types of tests, such as automated accessibility checks, API testing, or email testing. By reducing the barrier to test implementation, QA teams can focus on expanding their testing skills while simultaneously improving test coverage.
Communication Skills: The quality engineer works cross-functionally across the software development lifecycle to improve DevOps practices and the user experience. To do so, they need to be able to communicate easily with the QA team, developers, and product managers to resolve bugs and plan realistic sprint cycles. Low-code test automation solutions help them do so by making it easy to share test results. 36% of developers say that it takes too long to find the contextual information needed to quickly resolve errors, resulting in days-long delays in shortening development cycles. Low-code takes the guesswork out of sharing defect information by enabling everyone - regardless of coding skills - to contribute to testing and export the results into popular collaboration tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Jira. This way everyone has a shared understanding of defects that need to be addressed, accelerating development without sacrificing quality.
Adaptability: Even the most carefully planned sprint cycles can go awry, making it essential for quality engineers to be adaptable. Low-code test automation drastically reduces the amount of effort needed to create or update tests, enabling software testing teams to quickly adapt their testing strategy as the product evolves. But perhaps even more importantly, low-code test automation platforms offer new ways to harness data for optimal testing efficiency. Integrating with customer data platforms like Segment, for example, allow quality engineers to tailor their test coverage to how their users are actually using their product.
Enable Faster, More Confident Development Teams
Quality engineering is enabling software development teams to accelerate product velocity while also improving customer satisfaction. QA professionals are embracing a central role that encompasses a diverse set of both hard and soft skills, making it essential for their teams and their technology to support upskilling. Low-code test automation answers this demand by allowing manual testers, QA engineers, and early-stage quality engineers to learn on the job while simultaneously improving test coverage.
Start upskilling with low-code test automation today by creating low-code tests with mabl’s 14-day free trial.
