Testing is more than most people assume. It’s not just the responsibility of testers. To ensure quality across a project, the entire team must be involved. Every role contributes to the success of testing efforts. Let’s walk through the development lifecycle and explore how each project role can help build quality from the start.
The Testing Kick-off
It all starts with a story ticket… In QA projects, many different roles collaborate – from Product Owners to developers, UX designers, and the QA team. Each of these roles brings its own perspective, expertise, and priorities. That’s why it’s so important to establish clear processes and responsibilities when it comes to quality assurance – ideally through written documentation in the form of a ticket that involves all responsible stakeholders.
The Scrum Team
Product Owner and Product Manager
Product owner and product manager are terribly busy all the time, but it is also helpful if they support the team in testing in several ways. It starts with the Stories by giving them a clear and testable definition for example by using the INVEST method, this can be seen as first manual test activity. A second, easy to implement and very efficient activity is a Refinement of the story with the whole team. It helps to promote the exchange of knowledge and synergies. As a third activity, the product owner can test manually the most important business cases of a feature in an Acceptance Test.
UI/UX Designers
UI/UX teams play a pivotal role in quality assurance. Their design work lays the foundation for usability and functionality.
Provide Clear Specifications: Including detailed dimensions, element states, and adaptive layouts.
Focus on Accessibility: UI/UX can lead the charge in making products inclusive and compliant. Plus: Digital accessibility will be mandatory starting in June 2025, making it a key factor for quality and business success. Learn more about the new legal accessibility requirements here.
Join Developer Reviews: For UI-heavy features, designers should participate in reviews to ensure accurate implementation.
Das Tech-Team
Backend Developers
Back-end developers kick off the code-related quality process. Their responsibilities include:
Writing Unit Tests: Ideally reaching 80% coverage. These are the first line of defense.
Creating API Tests: At least one test per API should be written. These tests can be reused and maintained by QA.
Conducting Code Reviews: A two-step approach is best—peer review and, for major changes, running the code locally for functional validation.
Running Smoke Tests: A smoke test is a test that checks whether a software or system is functioning properly and validates the core functionality with QA-provided test suites, and align with QA for any additional required tests.
Frontend Developers
Frontend testing follows a similar pattern:
Unit Testing: Unit tests mark the first level of test automation and quality assurance by developers.
Integration Testing: Each API should have at least one test case. These can also be used and maintained by the QA team.
Code Review: During code reviews, a second developer checks the originally written code. Note: This procedure does not replace manual tests.
System and end-to-end testing: This is usually the responsibility of the QA team, but close collaboration is crucial here. The motto is: “Test what is needed”
Note: Consistent collaboration between frontend, backend, and QA ensures efficient, maintainable automation.
The Quality Assurance Team (QA)
All the threads come together in the QA team:
Enabling Quality Across the Team: QA supports the entire team’s quality assurance efforts throughout the development lifecycle.
Providing Transparency: QA tracks and communicates testing progress and software quality status.
Often underestimated, because “they don’t create that much code” as the developers is the QA team. They are responsible to ensure, that the whole team is enabled to fulfill their tasks in the quality assurance process over the whole development lifecycle, besides their own manual and automated testing tasks.
Transparency is essential for every testing process. Therefore, another important task of the QA team is to bring transparency into the testing process and the software quality state.
After a strategic project analysis to define the general test strategy one of the most important steps for the QA team is to create an efficient and stable Test Automation suite. Within this suite user workflows tests will be covered, to reduce the manual test effort as fast as possible.
At the lower test levels, no real user data is used. Instead, specifically constructed test data is utilized, which is based on typical use cases. This data is based on realistic scenarios without containing any personal or productive information.
Building Test Automation
One of QA’s key tasks is to establish a stable, efficient automation suite that:
Covers Real User Flows: Reducing manual effort over time.
Supports Continuous Delivery: Tests for the continuous integrations and delivery process.
Uses the Right Tools: Mixing technologies isn’t necessarily bad—choose what expands your testing capabilities.
Balances Test Types: Prioritize unit tests, followed by integration and then system tests.
The graphic clearly shows: Automated tests require more effort initially, but pay off in the long term. It is less about the pure test runs themselves - these are usually efficient - but rather about the initial overall effort required to set up a functioning test automation system.
This starts with the way developers structure their code, continues with the additional effort required for unit tests and extends to infrastructural challenges, such as firewalls between systems.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
Note: End-to-End tests involve external systems and often validate business-critical workflows, like confirming email delivery post-checkout. Remember, each test level increases in complexity and execution time—plan wisely.
There is another test automation level called End to End tests which describes a system test but with further external systems. These tests mostly cover important business workflows e.g. the verification of E-Mail content, after finishing a checkout process. Each level of test automation increases both, the complexity of implementation and the time required for execution. This should be considered before creation.
Apart from possible technical limitations, the blanket goal of “complete automation of all test cases” harbors the risk of unexpectedly high costs and is therefore usually not achievable. An Efficient and coordinated test automation is therefore crucial for the project.
This insight, that full automation is probably not possible, brings us to the next major area the QA team is working on, Manual testing.
Manual Testing Still Matters
With the introduction of agile development methods, the role of the manual tester has also expanded considerably. Beside the well-known manual functional testing our manual testers also care about aspects of test strategy, test management but they are also QA coaches. They support the other roles in the project to recognize, implement and fulfill their quality assurance tasks.
Early Involvement: QA should participate in refinement and estimation meetings to spot risks early.
Explorative Testing: This helps catch usability and edge-case issues that automation may miss.
Coaching and Strategy: Today’s QA professionals are also test strategists and quality coaches.
Detailed insights into automated and manual testing are provided here.
From Testing Phase to Quality Lifecycle
In the graphic below, we show how QA activities can be embedded throughout your agile development lifecycle. Testing isn't just a phase—it’s a continuous Agile Quality Lifecycle.
Conclusion: Testing is easy — when everyone is part of it. And remember: no system is ever completely issue-free, but as a team, we can get remarkably close.
We’re happy to support you with your testing processes – from strategy and planning to execution.
