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Quality engineering integrates quality practices throughout the development lifecycle, ensuring products meet high standards by preventing defects early and continuous improvements.
Published on: March 13 2025
Quality engineering, or QE, is the discipline that focuses on ensuring quality throughout the Software Development Life Cycle. It involves not only testing but also designing, developing and maintaining processes to ensure high-quality software products.
It includes various practices such as test automation, CI/CD, and others, which help streamline the development and testing process. When organizations adopt quality engineering principles, they can deliver software that meets customer expectations while fostering continuous improvement.
Quality engineering ensures quality is built into the Software Development Life Cycle right from the start. Instead of only looking for issues at the end, it focuses on embedding quality throughout the entire development process.
QA practices have evolved over time to be more proactive, but quality engineering takes this a step further by embedding quality throughout every phase. It incorporates quality measures as a key part of every phase, from design and planning to development, deployment, and maintenance. QE combines test automation, DevOps, CI/CD and continuous improvement to make quality a core part of the development lifecycle.
Quality engineering integrates with modern methodologies like DevOps and Agile, ensuring consistent quality in development and testing even as processes become faster and more adaptable. It also emphasizes collaboration between developers, testers and the operations team to identify areas for improvement and enhance processes.
Quality engineering is crucial as it ensures that your software is reliable, effective, and centered on users from the beginning. Here's why QE is crucial for delivering high-quality software products:
To implement QE practices effectively, it’s essential to recognize the responsibilities of a quality engineer.
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Quality engineers often have a software engineering background, as their role involves writing automated tests. Their tasks vary based on company practices, tools, and whether the pipeline is cloud-based or on-premises.
In cloud environments, they adapt testing for scalability, while on-premises, they focus on infrastructure and compatibility. In addition to testing, they may also manage dependencies and governance policies. Further responsibilities will be discussed later.
Here is an overview of the main responsibilities of a quality engineer:
With this understanding, let’s explore the primary goals that guide QE practices.
When implemented in software development, quality engineering has clear and specific goals that aim to ensure the quality of software products. These goals address the unique challenges and needs of the software development process:
Achieving these goals depends on the components that make up the QE framework.
Quality engineering is about embedding quality into every step of software development. Here are its core components:
To put quality engineering into practice, teams use the following methodologies:
These components are implemented effectively through the structured quality engineering life cycle.
The quality engineering lifecycle consists of five phases: planning, design implementation, testing, and maintenance. Each stage is important for maintaining quality throughout development.
They also list down production requirements, tools, resources, timelines, and potential risks. Developers, testers, and product managers work together to align expectations and create a clear roadmap that focuses on quality at every stage.
Every design element, from user interfaces to backend functions, is carefully reviewed to ensure it aligns with these standards. Best practices in coding and predefined quality checkpoints are incorporated into the development process to minimize errors and improve overall results.
Quality engineers collaborate closely with the development team to ensure adherence to coding standards and conduct early-stage testing.
Automated testing handles repetitive tasks, while manual testing focuses on more complex scenarios that need human judgment. The feedback from these tests helps developers refine the software and resolve issues.
Regular testing helps identify new issues or areas for improvement, while performance monitoring tools track real-world functionality to ensure the software meets user expectations.
Quality engineering relies on specific metrics to gauge performance and identify areas that may require improvement.
Below are key indicators used to measure QE success:
Quality engineers use QA testing tools to ensure that their releases meet project requirements. This helps provide a great user experience and minimize bugs or defects. However, with the rise of AI today, AI native agents, such as KaneAI, boost the efforts of QE teams and make testing more efficient.
KaneAI by LambdaTest is a GenAI native QA Agent-as-a-Service platform for high-speed quality engineering teams. With KaneAI, you can quickly create and refine complex test cases using natural language, removing the learning curve associated with test automation.
Key Features:
Now, let’s look at how quality engineering is different from traditional quality assurance in embedding quality throughout the development process rather than focusing on final-stage testing.
Here’s how quality engineering differs from quality assurance:
Aspect | Quality Engineering | Quality Assurance |
---|---|---|
Focus | Focuses on integrating quality into the entire development lifecycle. | Ensures product meets quality standards through defined processes. |
Scope | Covers the entire Software Development Life Cycle. | Mostly centered on the testing phase. |
Approach | Proactive and prevents defects by improving processes and practices. | Reactive and detects and fixes defects after they occur. |
Techniques | Uses automation testing, DevOps, and CI/CD pipelines for testing and deployment. | Uses manual and automation testing and also includes usability, performance, regression testing, and more. |
Feedback Loop | Provides continuous feedback to developers to fix the issues. | Feedback is primarily retrospective and used for process improvement. |
Quality engineering is a complete approach to ensuring high-quality software products. It integrates quality practices throughout the entire development process.
Unlike traditional quality assurance, which focuses on finding defects, QE emphasizes preventing them. It also promotes collaboration and continuous improvement. QE uses data-driven insights and advanced tools to improve processes, helping reduce defects and enhance the product's overall performance.
By adopting QE principles, organizations can deliver reliable, more capable software, which helps minimize rework and costs.
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