How To Succeed as SQA with Your Team (Part 2)

Greetings, my dear reader!

Let's continue our narration.

I hope you have documentation about a product (an application, system, etc.) that you're supposed to support. Its functionality, perhaps some test cases, etc.

I would recommend building a mental map or knowledge graph about a product. Potential areas to deep dive are product components (front-end: framework, components, etc.; back-end: database, APIs, etc.); data flows inside a product; how data transforms from one form into another (transformation); and data shape. Pay attention to user flows if it's a UI application.

When you're done with all of this, you can collect information about upstream and downstream systems. In your case, for the initial stage, it would be enough to know who is a producer of data for a product and who is a consumer (client/clients) of a product. Understand contracts and messages (events), especially data points.

This information is important because it will define your testing strategy in general, and then you will divide the testing strategy into branches with more detailed goals. (By product I mean an application.)

Another important aspect is the technological stack of a product. You may ask, why do we need this information? This actually will determine our next steps for changes. Here I'm talking about the general testing strategy of a product, such as test cases, coverage for data flows and functionality, test automation, quality gates, manual testing approaches, synthetic data generation, etc.

Other questions to cover:

I would recommend building knowledge graphs or mind maps using tools such as Diagram.net, Obsidian, or mind map applications.
Perhaps Confluence or other text processors or editors can be useful too.

Do not worry if something sounds unfamiliar or not connected by context; we will circle back to those sections and will rely on them as a reference later when we discuss a sample project.

Thanks for reading. I hope you find something useful and applicable to your day-to-day professional activities.