A software quality analyst’s exact responsibilities vary depending on the type of work he or she does and how the company in which the analyst works defines his or her position. However, in general, this analyst is in charge of supervising and participating in the testing of new software in development in order to identify errors or bugs. This process can be carried out in a variety of ways, including manual testing and the use of specialized software to conduct tests on the new program, which is usually handled by a software quality analyst.
A quality assurance analyst or a software quality assurance technician are other terms for a software quality analyst. The way software testing is done can differ significantly from one software developer to the next. In one setting, the software quality analyst may work directly with the newly developed software, looking for bugs and errors and determining the causes of those errors. In this role, an analyst will typically use the software in both normal and unusual ways, looking for and replicating errors in order to provide detailed documentation and reports to the programmers.
A software quality analyst at another company, on the other hand, might not work directly with the software in question, but instead provide a program that performs the necessary tests. In this scenario, the analyst examines the software that needs to be tested and either writes a new program or uses an existing testing program to run the tests. After that, the software quality analyst runs the program alongside the developed software to look for errors and bugs in a variety of ways. The results of this testing are then used by the analyst to create reports and documentation that inform the programmers about the errors they’ve encountered.
In some situations, the software quality analyst is not directly responsible for testing or running software, but rather acts as a liaison between testers and programmers. In this role, the analyst will most likely act as a team leader for testers who are looking for errors or bugs in the software. Testers prepare reports, which are then given to the software quality analyst, who processes them. The information from the analyst is then passed on to the programmers, often in a format that has been streamlined or otherwise made more directly useful to the programmers, either through additional documentation or with regard to the severity of a bug that has been discovered.